Matthew McManus on Liberal Socialism

Mutual Exchange Radio

Today my guest is Matthew McManus. Matt McManus is an incoming assistant professor of political theory at Spellman College. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality as well as The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, which we are discussing today. McManus sees himself as engaging in a project of retrieval of a forgotten tradition of thought within the liberal tradition which advocates for socialist ends. This is a project with which I have some affinity as a liberal anarchist, but I have some big disagreements with how he sees the difference between liberal socialists and other more pro-market liberals as well as the institutional form he thinks liberal socialism should take: a form of statist social democracy. You will see us get into those disagreements at the end of the discussion.

Show Notes

Matthew McMannus, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism

Jason Lee Byas, Radical Liberalism: The Soul of Libertarianism

Judith Shklar, The Liberalism of Fear

Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries

David Dyzenhaus, Hobbes and the Law

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice

Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society

Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist

Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Hayek, Marx, and Utopia

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program

David Prychitko, Marxism and Workers’ Self-Management: The Essential Tension

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France

Gary Chartier, Radicalizing Rawls

Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

FA Hayek, Individualism True and False

Gus Dizerga, Outgrowing Methodological Individualism

Tony Smith, Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism

Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State

Fabio Perocco, Racism In and For the Welfare State

Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards

Kjell Östberg, The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy

Pelle Dragsted, Nordic Socialism

John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

Wendy Brown, Walled States: Waning Sovereignty