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Axel Honneth The Idea of Social Freedom. On the Intellectual Roots of Socialism. (First draft, without footnotes) The idea of socialism is an intellectual product of the period of capitalist industrialization. It first saw the light of day in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when it turned out that the Revolution's demands for liberty, equality, and fraternity had remained empty promises for large segments of the population, and that they were still far from becoming social realities. It is true that the term "socialism" had already entered the vocabulary of philosophical debate in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Catholic clerics set out to expose the doctrines of the German school of natural law as dangerous aberrations. They used the term "socialistae", a neologism derived from the Latin term "socialis", with a polemical intention to refer to what they suspected to be a tendency in the writings Grotius and Pufendorf: namely, to think of the juridical order of a society as being founded on the human disposition to sociability (Geselligkeit) rather than on divine revelation.1 There is a straight path leading from this early critical use to the German jurisprudential manuals of the late eighteenth century, which referred to Pufendorf and his disciples as "Socialisten". By that time the term had shed its connotation of reproach and was meant simply to indicate the project of providing natural law with a secular basis in human sociability.2 1 2 1 Yet when the English expressions "socialist" and "socialism" gained currency throughout Europe in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century, their meaning was no longer in any way related to their original use in the context of the natural law debates. The followers of Robert Owen in England and of Charles Fourier in France now employed those terms to refer to themselves, without any intention of participating in philosophical disputes over the foundations of law and right.3 In this new context, the two expressions became (in Wolfgang Schieder's words) "future-oriented movement concepts" which denoted the political aim of founding associations that would contribute to moving society as a whole closer to a "social" condition properly speaking. To be sure, there existed efforts long before the first half of the nineteenth century to implement specific measures that would first make society properly "social". Take, for example, the Scottish moral philosophers who sought to remind us of the human sentiment of mutual sympathy and who were hoping to derive from it the principles of a wellordered society. Or take Leibniz who in his youth was flirting with ideas of this sort when he sketched plans for the establishment of learned societies, partly moved by political ambitions. Initially these societies were called "Sozietäten", later "academies", testifying to their inspiration in Plato's idea of philosophers' rule. They were meant to serve the common good by performing not only an educational and cultural role but also by facilitating the social integration of economic life.4 In his brief manuscript "Society and Economy", written in 1671, Leibniz sketched the economic tasks of the future academies and proposed that they should support the poor and ensure a minimum wage in order to end economic competition and thus to inaugurate "true love and trust" among the 3 4 2 members of society.5 Some passages of these writings read like anticipations of the radical aims that Charles Fourier, a hundred and fifty years later, was hoping to realize by establishing the kinds of cooperatives that he named "Phalanstères".6 Yet Fourier's plans for a cooperative society were developed in a normative context quite different from the one constituted by the feudal environment of Leibniz's time. In the intervening century and a half, the French Revolution with its principles of freedom, equality, and fraternity had instituted a set of moral demands which amounted to a list of requirements for any just social order and which could henceforth serve as a reference point for anyone aiming at a further improvement of social conditions. The French and English thinkers and activists who began to refer to themselves as "Socialists" in the 1830s did so with full awareness of the normative debt they owed to those revolutionary innovations: In contrast with Leibniz and other social reformers of prebourgeois times, who had to think of their own proposals as being at odds with normative reality, they were able to appeal to already institutionalized and generally validated principles, from which more radical consequences could be derived. It is not quite transparent in what ways exactly the groups that in retrospect came to be called "early socialists" thought of themselves as developing the three fundamental norms established by the French Revolution. From the 1830s onward there was a lively exchange between the followers of Robert Owen in England, on the one hand, and the two French movements initiated by Fourier and Saint-Simon, on the other. It seems that the thought of jointly presenting themselves as "Socialists" arose only after Owen had visited 5 6 3 Fourier in Paris in 1837.7 But their respective ideas about the shape of the desired social reforms were too different to reveal any sort of shared goal. For all three groups, however, the starting point of these protests against the post-revolutionary social order was indignation at the fact that the concurrent expansion of the capitalist market prevented large segments of the population from effectively claiming the liberty and equality promised to them by the revolutionary principles. It was regarded as "humiliating", "shameful", or simply "immoral" that rural and urban workers along with their families were subject to the arbitrary power of private landowners and factory owners, who regardless of their willingness to work forced on them a life of constant hardship and the ever-present threat of immiseration. If we are looking for a common denominator of the normative responses that the awareness of these social conditions elicited in the different strands of early socialism, it will be helpful to start with a proposal made by Émile Durkheim. In attempting to provide a definition of the term "socialism" in his famous set of lectures by that name, Durkheim suggested that what the various socialist doctrines had in common was the goal of placing the control over economic processes, which had slipped away from other social mechanisms, back into the hands of society as represented by the state. However great the differences between the multiple currents of socialism, in Durkheim's view they all shared the idea that the destitution of the working masses could be remedied only by re-organizing the economic sphere so as to tie its activities back to collective social decision-making.8 Even though this definition is not sufficient for an adequate understanding of the normative goals of socialism, it does at 7 8 4 least reveal the shared experiental basis of the various different movement and schools that soon developed under that name: Robert Owens and his disciples as well as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and their respective schools all thought that the injustice suffered by the working population was due to the fact that the capitalist market had moved outside the reach of social control and was now governed solely by its own law of supply and demand. But if one takes a closer look at the vocabulary shared by all the early socialist movements regardless of their differences, one is soon struck by the fact that Durkheim's proposal makes no attempt at all to explain its pervasive reference to the normative ideals of the French Revolution. Durkheim treats the various groups as though their sole concern were a problem of social technology, namely the social re-embedding of the market, rather than the historically much more salient goal of realizing for the broader population the recently proclaimed principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Similar attempts by other thinkers to articulate the central ambitions of socialism, impressive as they are in some respects, suffer from the same lack of attention to the underlying moral ambitions of the movement. To name just two examples, both John Stuart Mill's and Joseph Schumpeter's writings on socialism tend to reduce the socialist project to the sole aim of achieving a more equitable distribution of resources, without examining the underlying moral or ethical purposes.9 But the extent to which the early self-described "socialist" thinkers were in fact moved by genuinely normative principles, drawn from the list of demands put forward during the still recent revolution, is immediately apparent when we consider what justifications they offered for their projects. Robert Owen, who was more of a practical than a 9 5 theoretical bent and who was certainly least influenced by the reverberations of the great revolution, explained his initiation of workers' cooperatives in New Lanark by saying that the experience of mutual assistance would lead members of the lower classes to acquire "mutual benevolence" and would thus teach them a type of solidarity that extended even to strangers.10 Similarly, albeit with a commitment to more ambitious claims in social philosophy, Saint-Simon and his followers were convinced that workers' lack of freedom under capitalist conditions could be overcome only through a social order in which centralized planning would make it possible to remunerate each person according to his abilities and which would thus amount to a "universal association" of mutually supporting members.11 Finally, Fourier and his disciples justified their plans for a cooperative society by claiming that only the establishment of voluntary associations of producers, i.e. the "phalanges" I already mentioned before, would allow an adequate realization of the normative demand that all members of a society cooperate without coercion.12 Nowhere in these arguments for socialist aims is the socialization of ownership in the means of production presented as an end in itself or a simple instrument for a more equal distribution. Rather, to the extent that it is deemed necessary at all, it is conceived of as a prerequisite for the realization of quite distinct and properly speaking moral or ethical aims. Foremost among these are the first and the last of the three principles of the French Revolution, that is to say, liberty and fraternity, whereas equality is often given a subordinate role. At times one gets the impression that the three socialist groups were content with the rather incompletely realized legal equality of the time and were mainly concerned to establish on this minimal 10 12 11 6 juridical basis a community of mutually supportive producers who are led by solidarity to complement each others' respective abilities and contributions. Operative in the background of these normative ideas is a conviction that is stated only in passing by the various authors, but which is an important source of agreement among them. They all believe that the existing conception of individual freedom, conceived mainly in legal terms, is too narrow to be compatible with the ideal of fraternity. Employing some hermeneutic charity we might say that the three early socialist groups discovered an internal inconsistency among the different principles proclaimed by the revolution. The inconsistency is due to a narrowly legal or individualistic understanding of the freedom demanded by the revolution. All three groups are therefore, without quite realizing it, struggling to expand the liberal conception of liberty in such a way that it becomes compatible with the Revolution's other goal, that of "fraternity". The ambition of reconciling the two principles of liberty and fraternity by re-interpreting the former is even more apparent in the writers following the first wave of socialist movements. Louis Blanc and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, two critics of the expanding market economy who otherwise followed quite different trajectories13, each explain their critique by pointing to the specific conception of liberty that they believe to be reflected in the institutional foundations of the market: that is to say, a conception which ties liberty to the pursuit of purely private interests, or in Blanc's words, to "private egoism"14. Both writers were convinced that as long as this narrow construal of individual liberty remained prevalent, not only would the degrading economic conditions remain unchanged but moreover it would be impossible to realize the widely recognized demand for a "fraternal" society, a society of solidarity. Thus both Blanc 13 14 7 and Proudhon assumed that one task of the socialism they advocated was to eliminate an inconsistency among the several demands put forward by the French Revolution. They thought that the normative goal of fraternity, of standing up for one another, could not even begin to be realized because the further goal, freedom, was conceived exclusively in terms of the kind of private egoism that gave rise to the competitive social relations of the capitalist market. The economic policy blueprints developed by Blanc and Proudhon, which were designed either to supplement or to supplant the market by other forms of production and distribution15, were therefore primarily guided by the aim of establishing in the sphere of economic activity a type of freedom that would no longer stand in the way of realizing the demand for fraternity. Only if the economic core of the new society could incorporate freedom as a practice of solidarity, in which individuals mutually complement each other, rather than as the pursuit of merely private interests, could the normative demands of the French Revolution be consistently realized. If we now look back again at Durkheim's definition of the basic idea of socialism, we can venture a first intermediate conclusion: while he is correct in claiming that all the socialist projects share the same basic intention of re-integrating economic activity into the sphere of collective social decision-making, he overlooks the normative or ethical reasons that first gave rise to this intention. The early Socialists' main concern was not simply to place the economic sphere under the direction of collective social choices in order to avert the threat of a merely half achieved moralization of society, one that stops at the gates of the economy – as Durkheim wants to have it. Nor did their main goal consist simply in bringing about a more just distribution of vital material goods. 15 8 Rather a greater degree of socialization of production was meant to serve the moral goal of readjusting the freedom proclaimed by the Revolution to the moral demand of fraternity and solidarity. Instead of serving the pursuit of merely private interests, freedom was to be understood in a way that rendered it compatible with fraternity, the other revolutionary promise.16 So conceived, socialism was from the very beginning a movement of immanent critique of the modern capitalist social order. It accepted the normative foundations of that order's legitimacy – freedom, equality, and fraternity – but it harbored doubts as to whether those ideals could be consistently realized unless freedom were to be thought of in a less individualist fashion and more along the lines of an intersubjective process. The writings of the authors I have mentioned so far are of no real help in actually understanding this new conception of freedom, despite the fact that it was pivotal to their movements. It is true that the earliest socialist groups used terms such as "association", "cooperation", and "community" to indicate that the various economic set-ups they proposed, with their novel forms of production and distribution, were designed to ensure that individuals would be mutually dependent for their respective self-fulfillment. But they made no attempt to present this kind of intersubjective interdependence as a conceptual alternative to the merely individualist conception of freedom associated with the liberal tradition. One writer who takes at least a step in that direction is Proudhon, who in his 1849 Confessions of a Revolutionary goes so far as to say that "from a social perspective, freedom and solidarity are identical terms".17 To this sentence, which very clearly alludes to the vocabulary of the French Revolution, he adds that in contrast with the 16 17 9 Declaration of Man and Citizen of 1793 the socialists think of "the freedom of each" not as a "barrier" but as an "aid" to the freedom of all others.18 Yet this proposal becomes blurred again by the next step in Proudhon's argument. There he advocates the establishment of popular banks that would provide interest-free loans to small workers' cooperatives and would thereby facilitate the kind of intersubjective freedom just discussed. But this suggests that Proudhon holds merely that each individual's freedom should meet with the support and aid of other individuals, not that others are strictly speaking a condition of its full realization.19 Proudhon is still wavering between two different alternatives to the individualist conception of freedom. The difference between them turns on the question whether a free action can be considered complete prior to the contribution made by the other, or whether that contribution is a necessary element of the action, without which it remains incomplete. Depending on which of the two conceptions one favours, one is accordingly going to take somewhat different views regarding the structure of the "associations" or "communities" that are supposed to first enable a society to be properly social, by allowing freedom and fraternity to be reconciled and indeed identified with each other. On the first conception, a society is composed of individual members who are free prior to and independent of their social association and for whom the cooperation with others provides motivation and support, but not a condition of their freedom as such. The second conception, by contrast, views social cooperation as a precondition for each individual's full attainment of freedom, since the latter requires that an individual's incomplete practical plans are filled in and complemented by those of others. 18 19 10 In the writings of the early socialists and also in the writings of Proudhon, these different conceptions of what I will from now on refer to as "social freedom" are not yet adequately distinguished. It is true that they were already clearly aware that continuing the as yet unfinished project of the bourgeois revolution without becoming entangled in self-contradiction would require overcoming the individualism about liberty that found its expression, in particular, in the capitalist market economy. Freedom would have to be rendered compatible with the demand for fraternity. Yet the early socialists lacked the conceptual means to articulate in more concrete terms what it could mean for the achievement of individual liberty to be tied to the precondition of a communal life marked by solidarity. The first steps towards such a further articulation were taken by the young Karl Marx, who set himself the task, at about the same time as Proudhon did, to spell out the theoretical foundations of the incipient socialist movement. Living in exile in Paris, he was thoroughly familiar with the theoretical efforts of his French socialist contemporaries. But in contrast with them, Marx as a German did not directly face the challenge of articulating the aims of their shared project within the normative framework provided by the still unfinished revolution. He was able largely to forgo terms such as "fraternity", "liberty", and "solidarity", and to build instead on the efforts of his compatriots who sought to productively extend the Hegelian legacy. Taking up the terminology of idealism in the naturalistic interpretation provided by Feuerbach gave Marx an advantage with respect to conceptual sophistication, though it brought with it the disadvantage of greater opacity regarding moral and political implications. But even Marx's early works still betray the intention of demonstrating that the conception of liberty presupposed by the political economists and actualized in the capitalist market is characterized by a kind of individualism incompatible with the claims of a "true" community 11 among the members of society. Thus the young exile's writings from the 1840s can also be viewed as taking a further step within the theoretical project of developing the idea of "socialism" from the internally inconsistent aims of the liberal social order. In one of his most important writings from the 1840s, which has received much attention especially in recent years – his comments on James Mill's work on political economy – Marx explains what faults he finds with the current constitution of society and what, in his view, a non-deficient community would have to look like.20 His debt to Hegel is even more evident here than in the so-called Paris Manuscripts. It is reflected in the fact that the two models of society contrasted by Marx are characterized in terms of two different modes of mutual recognition. Marx holds that the members of a capitalist society relate to each other only very indirectly, by exchanging their respective products on an anonymous marketplace through the medium of money. To the extent that other participants in the market even become visible to any given individual, they do so exclusively in terms of abstract qualities like business acumen and economic interests, but not as specific other individuals with particular needs. In an ironical allusion to Adam Smith, Marx writes that the members of such a society are nothing but merchants to each other.21 The recognition which the members of a society must accord each other if they are to constitute an integrated social unit in the first place amounts here to nothing further than the mutual affirmation of the right to "outsmart" all the others. The individual actions that constitute the "social nexus" do not complement each other but are instead, in Marx's stark expression, performed "solely with the intention of plunder".22 20 22 21 12 What Marx is aiming to do in this first part of his investigation is to translate into Hegelian terms the very same arguments to which his socialist predecessors had already appealed in analyzing the impossibility of "solidarity" or "fraternal social relations" under the conditions of a market society. Since market participants encounter each other only as subjects interested in their own respective private advantage, they are unable to offer each other the sort of concern and support that would be required for social relations characterized by fraternity or solidarity. As if to convey an even more drastic sense of this prevention of solidarity, Marx's text alludes to a famous image from the Phenomenology of Spirit and states that "our mutual recognition" under these conditions takes the form of a "struggle" in which who prevails is determined by who possesses greater "energy, insight, or skill".23 Towards the end of his analysis Marx turns to a brief description of the relations of production that would obtain if the members of a society were united by a mutual recognition not of their private egoism but rather of their respective individual needs. This sketch has its roots in the anthropological notion, taken from Feuerbach and perhaps also from Rousseau, that the satisfaction of human needs almost always requires the activity of other subjects. Above a certain threshold of the division of labor, my hunger can be stilled only if others produce the food I need; and my desire for adequate shelter can be satisfied only if there are workmen willing to produce a habitation for me. Marx believes that the previously described capitalist conditions of production have the effect of systematically withdrawing this mutual dependency from the view of those affected by it. While it is true that the subjects are working in order to satisfy a certain economic demand, and thereby the needs that give 23 13 rise to this demand, their motivation is not concern for these desires of others but solely an egocentric interest in serving their own advantage. According to Marx things would be quite different if the goods produced in a society were being exchanged in ways other than through a moneymediated market. In that case, he thinks, each person would be aware of the needs of those for whom he was producing, so that he would find the characteristic human condition of mutual dependency affirmed both in his own action and in the anticipated reaction of the other person.24 Marx speaks here only of the "double affirmation" among the members of a society, but clearly what he is thinking of are conditions of production in which people mutually recognize each other’s individual needs. In what Marx is later going to call an "association of free producers", individuals would no longer be related to each other merely through the anonymous coordination of their respective private aims but would rather be motivated by a shared concern for the self-realization of all others.25 Formulating Marx's train of thought in this pointed way is useful because it enables us to abstract from the rather vague economic proposal he makes and to focus on those general features of it that point towards the concept of social freedom. Like his socialist predecessors, Marx initially thinks of freedom as the maximally unimpeded and unconstrained realization of self-chosen goals and intentions. He also agrees with them that under capitalist conditions, the exercise of freedom, so understood, implies that others are regarded as mere means to the pursuit of one's own interests, and is thus in conflict with the already institutionalized principle of fraternity. To resolve this internal contradiction Marx offers a rough sketch of a society in which freedom and solidarity are integrated with each other. He thinks that such an integration would be possible in a 24 25 14 social order in which each individual conceives of his or her own ends as also constituting the conditions of the ends of others; a social order, that is, in which the ends of different individuals interlock in such a way that they can be realized only on the basis of each individual’s full awareness of their mutual interdependency. But the reference to "love" that occurs in a central passage of the commentary on Mill26 also reveals quite clearly that the other person is thought to be relevant not merely to the execution but already to the formation of each individual's plans. As in relations of love, so too in the novel form of association envisioned by Marx my own activities will from the very outset be restricted to those aims that serve not only my own self-realization but also that of the other with whom I am interacting, since otherwise her freedom would not constitute a direct object of my concern. This important feature of Marx's model can be brought out more clearly by drawing on a distinction introduced by Daniel Brudney in the context of his comparison between Rawls and Marx. According to Brudney, social communities can be distinguished according to whether the ends shared by their members are merely overlapping or whether they are intertwined.27 In the first case, individuals do indeed pursue shared ends, but these are ends that they can jointly accomplish without having to individually aim at that joint accomplishment. An example of the collective realization of this type of shared end is the market, at least according to the classical conception of it. In it, each participant is able to pursue his own economic interests while thereby simultaneously furthering the shared aim of increasing everyone's wealth. Intertwined ends, by contrast, are ones whose realization requires that the members of a society jointly pursue them by each adopting them as a maxim or as 26 27 15 a direct goal. As Brudney points out, in this second case the individuals are active not merely “with one another” but "for one another", since what they desire is specifically to contribute to the realization of the ends shared by all. In the first case, the case of overlapping ends, the fact that my own actions contribute to the realization of those ends is a contingent effect of the content of my intentions. In the second case, the case of intertwined ends, their realization is a necessary result of the pursuit of my intentions. In my view it is quite apparent that Marx's proposed alternative to a capitalist social order is based on this latter model of social communities. Using the terminology of mutual recognition that is consistently employed by Marx in his commentary on James Mill's political economy, we can rearticulate the relevant distinction roughly as follows: whereas in a market-based society shared ends are realized insofar and because its members recognize each other only as individual consumers and systematically deny the relations of mutual dependence among them, the realization of shared ends in an association of free producers would be accomplished through the members' being intentionally engaged for each other's benefit, because they recognize each other as individuals with specific needs and because they act for the sake of satisfying those needs. Even though Marx himself does not say it, it seems evident to me that he takes his alternative social model to have accomplished something that his socialist predecessors had unsuccessfully attempted to do: that is, to provide an immanent extension or reformulation of the concept of individual freedom, and thus of the basic principle of legitimacy of the current social order, in such a way that it comes to necessarily coincide with the requirements of a life of fraternity or solidarity. At this point our task is thus to examine with a more systematic 16 intent whether the social model sketched by Marx can indeed fulfil its aspiration of reconciling individual freedom and solidarity in a novel way. To begin with, this analysis is going to pay no heed to the fact that all the early proponents of socialism thought of their principle of social freedom as having its place only in the sphere of social production or labor. Imagining that this sphere alone could account for the reproduction of society as a whole, they accorded no independent role to political democracy and were therefore never prompted to ask whether other forms of freedom might perhaps already have found institutional embodiment there. But these questions I leave to a fourth chapter in the planned book, here I will only discuss whether the model of social freedom just sketched constitutes a sound and independent alternative to the individualism characteristic of liberal conceptions of freedom. Did the early socialists really develop an original and novel conception of freedom or did they merely offer an improved presentation of what is known to us as "solidarity" or, to use the older term, "fraternity"? A premise of the liberal model of freedom is the idea, at first glance hardly contestable, that it makes sense to speak of individual freedom only where a subject is able to follow through with his own intentions while facing as little impediment or constraint as possible. Freedom of action, so conceived, is said to have justifiable limits only where its exercise might create impediments to the freedom of other subjects. Liberalism therefore ties the general protection of this kind of freedom to the idea of a legal order designed to ensure that each individual is enabled to act without constraint to an extent that is compatible with everyone else's equal claim to the same freedom of action. A first complication for this basic liberal model is introduced by Rousseau and, following him, by Kant. Both of them share the conviction that we cannot 17 speak of individual freedom where a person's motives are provided not by freely adopted ends but by merely natural drives or inclinations. Both therefore introduce an added requirement to specify the internal dimension of freedom, on which the older conception had remained silent: the decision or choice that initiates an action must be an act of self-determination, which ensures that the ends pursued by a subject have their source in her exercise of reason.28 It seems that the early socialists were on the whole happy to go along with this transition from a "negative" to a "positive" conception of liberty, to use the terms coined by Isaiah Berlin to mark the extra step taken by Rousseau and Kant (a step against which Berlin was warning for political reasons).29 Even if the socialists may not have been aware of the detailed arguments for the new conception, it would still have been close to obvious to them, whether on the basis of Rousseau's "Contrat social" or on the basis of Kant's moral philosophy, that individual freedom is present only where the ends of action are rationally intelligible rather than simply dictated by nature. However, when it comes to spelling out what exactly is meant by "rational", the socialists are certainly no longer following Kant. For them it is not true that actions can be called "free" only if they result from an individually executed procedure whereby one's maxims are tested for their morality. It is more plausible to think that they are following Rousseau or, in the case of Marx, Hegel, both of whom hold for different reasons that individual intentions are "free" to a sufficient degree when they are aimed at the satisfaction either of needs that are "not corrupt" in the sense of "natural", or of needs that correspond to the reason's current historical stage.30 For the socialists, then, individual freedom initially means simply the ability to realize one's own free intentions – that 28 30 29 18 is, those intentions that are more or less shared by all on a rational basis – by performing actions that are subject to no other constraint than the one deriving from the equal claim of all others to the same kind of freedom. The special twist that Proudhon and Marx give to this model of positive freedom results from the fact that they take a much more encompassing view of the kinds of unjustified constraints that may prevent subjects from realizing their freely adopted ends. The early liberal view largely identified those constraints with external social forces, whose paradigmatic example was the authority of a person or body to impose its own will on a subject.31 The republican tradition, represented today by writers like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, expanded the scope of what counts as coercive constraint so as to include ways of influencing a person's will. This is what is meant by the now familiar formula of "freedom as non-domination".32The socialists go much further than this. They hold that there is coercion wherever the realization of a person's reasonable ends meets with social obstacles in the guise of opposing ends had by another person. In their view, the truly non-coercive realization of an individual's rational ends within the social whole would be accomplished only if the relevant action met with the approval of all others and only if the action's completion strictly required complementary actions on the part of other individuals. Ultimately, thus, individual freedom is present only where it has in fact attained "objective" form, to use Hegel's terminology; that is, only where an individual is able to regard the other members of his society no longer as potential sources of 31 32 19 constraints on the pursuit of his own ends but rather as partners whose cooperation is required for the realization of those ends.33 This is the point in the socialists' argument where their special notion of "community" becomes relevant, which they tend to mention in the same breath with "liberty". However much their terminology may vary, they always mean by "community" something more than what is usually denoted by the term. A community, in their sense, is characterized not only by shared values and a certain degree of identification with the aims of the group, but also and especially by mutual support and concern. We already encountered this strand of the socialist concept of community earlier in the idea of ends that do not just overlap but intertwine, so that agents are active not merely with one another but for one another.34 Thus the question we now need to address is what connection the socialists saw between their specific concept of community, on the one hand, and their concept of liberty, on the other. One way of making this connection would be by thinking of communal solidarity as a necessary precondition for the exercise of the kind of freedom I described. In a somewhat weaker form, one which does without the loaded notion of community as mutual concern, such a thesis has been defended by Joseph Raz in his book The Morality of Freedom. According to him, individuals are unable to make use of their autonomy unless they live in a society that offers them specific options for the realization of their various aims.35 But the socialists want to go further than that. The communities outlined by them are not merely a necessary precondition of the kind of freedom they have in mind. Rather it seems that only cooperative activity within a fraternal community counts as a 33 35 34 20 proper exercise of freedom in the first place, while anything short of that does not really deserve this title. Social freedom then means participation in the social practices of a community whose members have such a degree of mutual concern for each other that they help others realize their reasonable needs, and do so for their sake. Here the concept of freedom has become an element of a type of holistic individualism, according to which what is meant by the term "freedom", even in the basic sense of an unhindered realization of individual goals or ends, is essentially something that cannot be achieved by any individual person but only by a suitably constituted collective. This does not entail that the collective should be conceived of as some sort of higher-order entity existing over and against the individuals who are its parts.36 It is true that on the socialist conception, freedom is a property, capacity, or achievement of a social group taken as a whole. But the existence of the group itself is owed to the cooperative activity of individual subjects. The collective becomes a bearer of individual freedom only when it succeeds in instilling in its members certain kinds of practical dispositions. Foremost among these is a mutual sympathy that results in everyone's exhibiting a certain amount of concern for everyone else's self-realization, for non-instrumental reasons. The socialists believe that to the extent that such modes of interaction become prevalent in a society, all the negative phenomena that characterize a capitalist society are going to disappear. Once subjects have a sufficient degree of sympathy for each other, they will relate to one another as equals and will refrain from any kind of exploitation or instrumentalization. 36 21 The idea of socialism, as it is originally conceived, is rooted in the notion that it will be possible in the future to fashion societies in their entirety after this model of a fraternal community. This is a way of swiftly if somewhat forcibly unifying into one single principle the three demands issued by the French Revolution, which were otherwise seen to be standing in tension with each other. Socialism is the idea to allow individual freedom to flourish in such a way that it becomes congruent with a form of life in solidarity – that is the communitarism elements in all forms of socialism, as David Miller has shown. Individual freedom is interpreted as consisting in finding one's complement in the other, so that it properly coincides with the requirements of equality and fraternity. This holist idea, which conceived of freedom as something realizable not by any individual but only by the fraternal community itself, was the point of departure for the socialist movement. All the measures later taken by its adherents to remedy existing evils – both the beneficial and the harmful measures – were ultimately guided by the aim of creating such a community whose members would mutually complement each other and would treat each other as equals. It was this close link with the demands of the Great Revolution that from the very beginning made it difficult for bourgeois critics of socialism to simply reject the aims of the movement as unjustified. After all, the socialists were appealing to the very same normative principles under whose banner the bourgeois had once been fighting for a democratically organized state. To this day, the charges that socialism is guilty of collectivism or of a romanticization of community therefore leave a strange aftertaste, insofar as they seem like attempts to deny the fact that the basic principles of legitimacy of present-day societies include not only liberty but also solidarity and equality. 22 At the same time, the socialists made it easy for their critics, who appeared on the scene very soon. They failed to develop a sufficiently convincing version of their original and path-breaking idea. The proposals produced during the first half of the nineteenth century all had flaws that quickly exposed them to serious objections. Not only did they, as I briefly pointed out above, strictly limit the idea of a fraternal community to the sphere of economic activity, without giving any closer consideration to the question whether a society marked by a rapid increase in complexity could really organize and reproduce itself in its entirety by relying solely on that single sphere. For reasons that are hard to fathom they (also) largely ignored the entire domain of collective political decision-making, so that they were unable to sufficiently explain the relation between their own project and the recently established legally defined liberties. And finally, the founders of the socialist project – above all, Saint-Simon and Marx – tied that project to a metaphysical account of history that rendered it all but impossible to view its ambition as one of engaging in experiments designed to assess capitalist societies' capacity for transformation. Since they thought it a matter of historical necessity that the revolution for which they were calling would take place at some point in the future, albeit perhaps in the near future, all attempts to implement gradual changes here and now were dismissed as both cognitively and politically useless. Among these several flaws of the original socialist program we can distinguish between ones that are due to the historical context in which this program originated, i.e. the early phase of the industrial revolution, and others that are more fundamental and that concern the very structure of the proposal. 23