These are perilous times for liberalism. Once taken-for-granted, liberal shibboleths are increasingly attacked from across the ideological spectrum. The end of history has come to an end, and liberals, for our part, have been forced into a defensive crouch. How to respond? One option is to dig in our heels, and insist that, for all the woes wrought by the (neo)liberal order—inequality, polarization, civic disenfranchisement—classical liberalism remains the best of all possible alternatives. This, I think, is a losing option. Another, more promising option, is to reimagine what liberalism could and should be. This is the route taken by McManus in his wide-ranging and learned The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. The guiding theory behind McManus’s project is that the only way liberalism endures is if liberals seize this moment to rethink the liberal tradition. And as the book’s title suggests, for McManus this means tearing down the wall separating liberalism from socialism.

Aware that liberals and socialists have not always got along (an understatement, to be sure), and that talk of “liberal socialism” will lead many to balk, the book’s chief method is exegetical. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is organized as a series of reconstructions of earlier and contemporaneous attempts to articulate the synthetic tradition of liberal socialism (LS). McManus sees his project as one of “retrieval,” meant to provide a canonical “intellectual past and present for liberal socialism” (3). LS, McManus contends, is of longstanding provenance, for despite the diversity of its spokespeople, all have shared the following three commitments. First, a commitment to a methodologically collectivist social ontology and normative individualism. Second, an egalitarian developmental ethic (as opposed to a possessive ethic). And third, a basic social structure that is highly participatory, and which extends liberal democratic principles of equality and liberty into the economy and the family. This tripartite schema, McManus suggests, defines LS at its broadest, and in my view, it is the book’s greatest contribution, as it provides a practicable framework with which to distinguish LS from other liberalisms and socialisms.

Still, this is no mere intellectual history. McManus spends considerable space and time critiquing what he considers the limitations and deficiencies of both past and present formulations of liberal socialism. McManus, then, plays the role of the progressive reformer; not satisfied with ideal theory, he is concerned with devising a version of LS that can enact change in the real world. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is a book with many virtues, but for this reader, it was these critical reflections that were the least satisfying. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Part I of the book presents a pre-history of LS, surveying the egalitarian and revolutionary dimensions of the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Paine, and Wollstonecraft. While McManus admits that these thinkers should not be considered liberal socialists—it is not for nothing that C.B. MacPherson traced the roots of possessive individualism to Hobbes and Locke—he convincingly demonstrates that each articulated ideas, such as the presupposition of moral equality and democracy’s need for economic and sexual justice, which would lay the groundwork for the later emergence of LS.

Part II of the book covers the “maturation” of LS. The first liberal socialist, McManus maintains, was Mill. In fact, McManus is of the view that, despite their profound stylistic differences, on questions of substance, Mill and Marx agree on a surprising amount. Of course, where they disagree is on the need for liberal rights and the rule of law; liberal socialists like Mill reject Marx’s view that a socialist economy will make such liberal accoutrements redundant. After Mill, LS found spokespeople in disparate and sundry places—which is why the tradition requires retrieving; McManus asserts that across the views of Christian ethicist R.H. Tawney, atheist Eduard Bernstein, economist J.M. Keynes, anti-fascist Carlo Rosseli, and democratic theorist MacPherson one finds a sort of LS overlapping-consensus. However, the liberal socialist that most stokes McManus’s admiration is Rawls (he identifies as a “Marxist Rawlsian or Rawlsian Marxist” (176)). Indeed, McManus reads A Theory of Justice as the most systematic (if not the most rhetorically compelling) rendering of LS there is. Yet, despite this high praise, McManus also accepts Charles Mills’s critique of Rawls, which interprets the great liberal as, in general, naive to the role of power, and more specifically, blind to the racial assumptions operative in liberal societies (and theory).

Part III considers the present and future of LS by surveying two contemporary iterations of the tradition—those championed by Chantal Mouffe and Axel Honneth, respectively. McManus sees in Mouffe’s left populism important lessons about power and conflict in democratic life which liberal socialists should reckon with, and he reads Honneth as offering a Left-Hegelianism that can provide substance to the social ontology and developmental ethic inherent to LS. Although McManus closes with a reflection on the limitations of the LS tradition—he views LS as insufficiently attentive to power, as too wedded to statist approaches to justice, and as having failed to be sufficiently intersectional—he remains optimistic about the prospects of LS in the twenty-first century.

I, too, remain hopeful, and in this I am very much indebted to McManus. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism is an engaging, fun, and impressive romp through an undervalued strand of the liberal tradition. We need more works like this. Further, McManus is a gifted writer, and his passion for creating a more humane world is palpable on each page. For these reasons alone it deserves a wide readership. Still, given that MacManus self-consciously goes beyond intellectual history, taking swipes and stabs at the “limitations” and “deficiencies” of earlier and present liberal socialisms to stakeout a blueprint for the LS of tomorrow, this reader found himself, at times, disappointed. In brief, it seems to me that McManus was unwilling to reckon with the difficult trade-offs or compromises that come with any genuine attempt at ideological synthesis. At the risk of caricaturing, McManus’s critical asides can give the impression that he (naively) assumes all good (progressive) things go together, and that if only earlier LS theorists weren’t blinded by the bigotry, selfishness, or nationalism of their times, they would have seen this. I admit this is something of a caricature; McManus is a much more sophisticated thinker than this. However, I do not think I am conjuring this out of thin air. Nor do I think this assumption is unique to McManus; in fact, I consider it widespread on the left. By contrast, I believe that any workable LS will have to face head-on the real tensions and trade-offs that arise when one strives to synthesize liberalism and socialism. And I think only an LS that accepts the necessity of compromise will be able to attract popular support among a broad coalition.

In truth, I suspect McManus broadly agrees. And so, I eagerly anticipate his next book.