Seeing like a Socialist: On Socialist Worldviews from Polanyi to Taylor to Now

ABSTRACT

In this article we argue that reinvigorating socialist politics requires championing a socialist worldview that goes beyond the critique of capitalism. Neglecting such an outlook leaves socialism tethered to the fortunes of capitalism and inhibits a broader account of its own virtues. We begin by explaining why worldview thinking is appropriate today. Then we examine two underappreciated works by Karl Polanyi (his 1927 lecture “On Freedom”) and Charles Taylor (his 1974 essay “Socialism and Weltanschauung”). Each treats worldview thinking as indispensable and we use them as catalysts for developing a socialist vision. Finally, we bring our insights to bear on the worldview potential of socialist republicanism. We contend that a promising worldview emerges by elaborating the following components: a political anthropology of human possibilities; anti-capitalism, social freedom, and non-domination; socialist civic virtues; and the promise and limits of pluralism.

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Association for Political Theory’s annual conference in 2020. Funding to support this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and King’s University College.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Karl Polanyi, “On Freedom,” in Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation, eds. Michael Brie and Claus Thomasberger (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018), 298–319. Charles Taylor, “Socialism and Weltanschauung,” in The Socialist Idea: A Reappraisal, eds. Leszek Kolakowski and Stuart Hampshire (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 45–58.

² Raymond Geuss, Who Needs a World View? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), 1.

³ Ibid., 93.

⁴ Ibid., 1.

⁵ Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital, trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012), 24.

⁶ Ibid., 25.

⁷ Stephen White, “Weak Ontology and Liberal Political Reflection,” Political Theory 25, no. 4 (1997): 505.

⁸ Ibid., 506.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 48.

¹¹ Ibid., 10.

¹² Ibid., 36.

¹³ Ibid., 27.

¹⁴ Ibid., 21.

¹⁵ As examples of this lament, see Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, trans. Joseph Ganahl (Malden, MA.: Polity, 2017), vii; Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 222–23; Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 2–15.

¹⁶ On the political identifications attributed to Polanyi, see Timothy David Clark, “Reclaiming Karl Polanyi, Socialist Intellectual,” Studies in Political Economy 94 (September 2014), 61–84.

¹⁷ For two otherwise engaging examples exhibiting this neglect, see Interpreting Modernity: Essays on the Work of Charles Taylor, eds. Daniel Weinstock, Jacob T. Levy and Jocelyn Maclure (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020); Charles Taylor, ed. Ruth Abbey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). A rare corrective is Ian Fraser’s “Charles Taylor, Marx and Marxism,” Political Studies 51, no. 4 (2003): 759–774.

¹⁸ Block and Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism, 221.

¹⁹ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 299.

²⁰ John Gunther, Inside Europe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), 379.

²¹ Polanyi, “On Freedom,” 299.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid., 298.

²⁴ Michael Brie, “This freedom kills: Karl Polanyi’s quest for an alternative to the liberal vision of freedom,” in Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, eds. Radhika Desai and Kari Polanyi Levitt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 189–208.

²⁵ Rogan, The Moral Economists.

²⁶ Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020).

²⁷ Polanyi, “On Freedom,” 301.

²⁸ Ibid., 304.

²⁹ Ibid., 301.

³⁰ Ibid., 306.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid., 311–12.

³³ Ibid., 302.

³⁴ See Honneth, The Idea of Socialism, 27–50.

³⁵ See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 73–89, 129–45.

³⁶ See Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2^nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 233–68.

³⁷ Brie, “This freedom kills,” 196.

³⁸ Taylor, “Socialism and Weltanschauung,” 53. Taylor wrote in a highly gendered way in 1974 despite his progressive commitments. Today it should be unquestioned that socialism must benefit women at least as much as men – and potentially more so given their unequal starting point.

³⁹ Ibid., 45–46.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 49.

⁴¹ Ibid., 57.

⁴² Ibid., 58.

⁴³ Nancy Fraser, “Why Two Karls are Better than One: Integrating Polanyi and Marx in a Critical Theory of the Present,” in Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation, 72–75.

⁴⁴ Taylor, “Socialism and Weltanschauung,” 56.

⁴⁵ Polanyi, “On Freedom,” 316.

⁴⁶ Taylor, “Socialism and Weltanschauung,” 55.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Polanyi, “On Freedom,” 300.

⁴⁹ Taylor, “Socialism and Weltanschauung,” 57.

⁵⁰ Some examples include: Michael J. Thompson, “The Radical Republican Structure of Marx’s Critique of Capitalist Society,” Critique 47, no. 3 (2019): 391–409; William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 58–74; James Muldoon, “A socialist republican theory of freedom and government,” European Journal of Political Theory (May 20, 2019), available online at https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885119847606.

⁵¹ See Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 26–74, and Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

⁵² Quentin Skinner, “The republican ideal of political liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, eds. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 305–8.

⁵³ Alex Gourevitch, “Labor Republicanism and the Transformation of Work,” Political Theory 41, no. 4 (2013): 598–601.

⁵⁴ Tom O’Shea, “Socialist Republicanism,” Political Theory 48, no. 5 (2020): 551–2.

⁵⁵ Philip Pettit, “Freedom as Antipower,” Ethics 106 (April 1996), 576–604.

⁵⁶ Thompson, “The Radical Republican Structure of Marx’s Critique of Capitalist Society,” 395.

⁵⁷ Muldoon, “A socialist republican theory of freedom and government,” 13.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 11.

⁵⁹ Skinner, “The republican ideal of political liberty,” 304.

⁶⁰ Muldoon, “A socialist republican theory of freedom and government,” 11.

⁶¹ Ibid. And in Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Reform or Revolution and Other Writings (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2006), 216.

⁶² Rosa Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?,” in Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 369.

⁶³ Ibid. We recognize Steve D’Arcy’s “Rosa Luxemburg on ‘the Socialist Civic Virtues’,” The Public Autonomy Project (September 9, 2014) available online at https://publicautonomy.org/2014/09/09/rosa-luxemburg-on-the-socialist-civic-virtues/. See also Muldoon’s excellent chapter on socialist civic virtues in his Building power to change the world: the political thought of the German council movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

⁶⁴ Thompson, “The Radical Republican Structure of Marx’s Critique of Capitalist Society,” 397.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 399.

⁶⁶ See Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–26.

⁶⁷ Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, New Edition (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2014), 437–40.

⁶⁸ “Political citizens” is Honneth’s term that we appropriate as a term of art to mean anyone committed to social change for reasons other than self-interest or intergroup domination. See The Idea of Socialism, 99.

⁶⁹ Michael J. Thompson, “Karl Kautsky and the Theory of Socialist Republicanism,” in The German Revolution and Political Theory, eds. Gaard Kets and James Muldoon (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 171.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ Kevin Duong, “No Social Revolution Without Sexual Revolution,” Political Theory 47, no. 6 (2019): 828.

⁷² Anne Phillips discusses limits to (bourgeois) republican thought in “Feminism and Republicanism: Is this a Plausible Alliance?” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 279–93.

⁷³ Luxemburg, “What Does the Spartacus League Want?” 370.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported in part by funding from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

John Grant

John Grant is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at King’s University College, Western University (London, Ontario), and a co-editor with the journal Contemporary Political Theory. He is the author of the books Lived Fictions: Unity and Exclusion in Canadian Politics (University of British Columbia Press, 2018), and Dialectics and Contemporary Politics: Critique and Transformation from Hegel through Post-Marxism (Routledge, 2011). His previous articles have focused on topics such as constituent power and authoritarian populism, political imaginaries, riots, citizens’ assemblies, and toxic masculinity. They have appeared in outlets including the European Journal of Political Theory, New Political Science, Polity, Political Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, and Constellations. His current multi-year project called “Democratic Socialism in Imagination and Practice” is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Mallory Dunlop

Mallory Dunlop holds a BA Honors Specialization in Political Science from Huron University College, Western University (London, Ontario). She received the 2019-2020 Huron University College Political Science Award in International Politics for her academic performance in the field of international politics. Her research interests also include socialist thought, critical theory, and conflict analysis and resolution in Africa. She is now undertaking a double degree in law (JD, University of Ottawa) and international politics (MA, Norman Patterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University).