The Relationship Between Liberalism and Socialism

Socialism is best regarded as the radicalization and transcendence of liberalism. Socialism draws on the normative principles that drove the bourgeois revolutions and which liberal society professes to embody, and demands that these ideals are more fully realized. In forcing liberalism forward in such a way, socialists push liberalism beyond itself. As Étienne Balibar argues, liberalism's core normative commitments — equality and liberty — exist in a state of tension with their supposed institutionalization in the structures of liberal society. The very universalism of these principles generates a dynamic of struggle that tends to outrun the structural limits of liberal capitalism. Further, ideals of liberty and equality are more suitably grounded in a view of humans as irreducibly social beings rather than in liberalism's radically individualist ontology. A socialist society embodying an ethics of cooperative, reciprocal self-realization would realize liberty and equality much more fully than is possible in liberal society.