In more than one post here — in the single post I managed in the whole first half of this year, particularly — I’ve suggested that it’s good sense to draw distinction between liberalism and a condition (our shared condition, for just about anybody likely to read this) of liberal-order or liberal-society existence. The former isn’t one but contradictorily multiple, for one thing. The latter’s persistence or dominance anywhere doesn’t depend on participants’ adhering in any strong way, or maybe at all, to some variety of the former, for another. This can be endlessly elaborated — but let that go for now. What’s on my mind in the present post is sort of adjacent, a question or questions at the meeting of liberalism and socialism, historical contraries.

As to immediate thoughts, I’m led in through being put on to Lea Ypi’s work by someone I’ve been following (and in very modest terms supporting) a long time, UK illustrator Holly Exley — a great reader! I owe acquaintance with Ypi to Exley’s reading and talking about both 2022’s Free and this year’s Indignity. I don’t know that I’m going to get to either book anytime soon, but I’m happy, that aside, in Ypi’s being a much-recorded speaker and in her packaging some of her scholarly material lately as talks under umbrella title ‘Moral Socialism.’ A version of these is her three-parter for Kritische Theorie in Berlin, the 2024 Walter Benjamin lectures — recordings appended below (and conveniently set to start after German-language opening remarks), at end of post.

In posts I have not accomplished (and won’t) this year, there’s sort of a digression on Marx and Henri Bergson that preoccupied me for a while and to which — my complete inadequacy to the subject very much acknowledged at every step — I’d really like to return sooner or later. One thing the present post is for, for myself, is keeping those wheels turning.

The notion which conventionally speaking the word socialism raises for us was never Karl Marx’s baby, yet nobody, now or over many generations past, calls socialism to mind without Marx’s involvement. That enduring fact owes in great part to the place he holds among a succession of major modern thinkers of German-language Europe, thanks especially to his powerful reformulation of existing socialist vision in a ‘materialist’ answer to the ‘idealism’ of his philosophical forebears’ exquisite construction. Of the towering forebears, the one we connect with Marx most is G. W. F. Hegel, but the first in importance generally is Immanuel Kant, the guy on whose thought Lea Ypi specializes. A way to think about her Moral Socialism talks, it seems right to say, would be that they represent a project for putting Marx into renewed dialogue with Kant.

This project has urgency for Ypi. She addresses listeners conscious of belonging, as she puts it, to ‘times of crisis.’ Reestablishing socialist and Marx-Engels-tradition ideas in Enlightenment earth, reconnecting them for us to thought that had been crucial (though flawed) response to prior times of crisis, bolsters them for new test against authoritarian and anti-democratic force they face now, she wants such listeners to hear.

At the same time, Ypi evidently seeks in some sense a belated resuscitation — through exposing capitalism to demolishing critique she derives from this same exacting (or labored), universalism-aspiring rationalist account of the human that mature liberalisms reckon from, especially — of liberal thought in its late, fracturing, ‘end of history’ (as the subtitle to her Free has it) moment. Socialism is at essence just liberalism minus capitalism, after all, she says with a degree of cheek.

I’m not so sure, for my part, that it makes sense to imagine liberal condition divested of the capitalist-economism engine, however vital and effectual the forms of liberal thought supported in the way. I’m not so sure, that is by implication, that there doesn’t need to be first a real passing away of the liberal before any glimpse of a kingdom of Enlightenment-rationalist expectation comes.

Which obviously isn’t to say that I care somehow less to learn what Ypi means to teach about what Kant and Marx (respective perhaps very serious moral and intellectual failures notwithstanding) were no doubt alike in looking for. Ypi really does mean to teach, I want to emphasize here — to open the subject up to our responsive effort of reflective understanding, that is, not to hold it out for our fascination merely. This listening is exceptionally worthwhile quite apart from whether one agrees with various conclusions she comes to.

Something her work is clearly really good for learning is the appreciation of deep connection among forms of thought of European inheritance even where, as necessarily it does, rupture or harsh critique and conflict characterize the history. (We want ultimately to appreciate deep connection beyond the seeming bounds of whatever we identify as European inheritance! But it’s okay to limit scope here.) That’s appreciation easier to regard as basic the further in past the figures and sources of forms of thought lie, of course. And Marx and Kant (should it need observing) stand today still at no great remove — they’re pretty fresh really. Motivations for caricaturing or rendering foreign and hostile such recent turns in the historical play of ideas, especially where they’re turns with wide impact in common culture and political life, are many. It pays to be watchful for false or simply shallow representations of these persons of large profile and the thinking they bear, to avoid letting the thickness and rootedness of their intellectual enterprise and experience become obscured. It pays to seek richly developed, full portrayals — portrayal such as Ypi offers in these talks.

An excerpt from close to end of the first of the three-lecture Critical Theory in Berlin series (recordings of which, again, you’ll find at bottom of page):

We need to place our thinking within a horizon of peace and globally just political relations, which is what Kant’s cosmopolitanism is essentially about. And this is perhaps the greatest difference between someone like Kant and someone like Hegel, who were both influences on the Marxist tradition — and actually the reason to, I think, support Kant on this. So, like Hegel, Kant thought that in a globalized world, the central agents of history were states, but that states were not condemned to fighting each other always as Hegel ended up concluding. . . . And in that sense I think the Kantian analysis is much closer to the socialist tradition and to a more nuanced account of the world, where the diagnosis is on this global social structure that is capitalism, which undermines freedom, including the freedom that is embodied by the liberal state in its aspirations — and, that is, also therefore closer to Marxist ideal of a classless society, which is a society that has fundamentally resolved conflict, a society of peace. . . .

[I]n this sense you might say that the kind of Kantian ‘kingdom of ends’ is the moral ideal of a world free from conflict that is difficult to realize in a social system that is premised on competition, antagonism, class differences, and perpetrates conflict and indeed feeds off that conflict, lives off it — including war. So with Kant and Marx we have to recognize unfreedom not just within and between states but also between agents that transcend state borders. And again, this is an insight that comes from Kant’s cosmopolitanism, where you have these relations that are, that go over and above the relation between states. For Kant, this means, as I say, recovering to begin with a global epistemic standpoint — hence the question of ‘What can I know?’ — which then becomes critique of society. For Marx, it means acknowledging the capitalist class as a global entity that perpetrates these injustices, because Marx says under capitalist — and this is the punchline — under capitalist relations the Kantian ideal of perpetual peace becomes really difficult to realize. . . .

So I’m just going to leave you with one final thought about this concept of world philosophy and the importance of recovering this cosmopolitan standpoint. Because the theory of right that comes out of this critical way of thinking, out of the critique of reason, is actually really a theory of what I might, what I call ‘global relational freedom,’ where you have private right, public right, international right, cosmpolitan right — and these aren’t just kind of stacked up on each other like little Ikea boxes, but they are actually harmonically integrated, and systematically integrated — and where, although for someone like Kant property for example was an essential component of realizing freedom of agency, if you think about what does that mean, this connection between private, public, domestic, international, cosmopolitan right, mean for private property, then you get a very very different picture from one that says, well first we realize private property in the state and then we kind of figure out what goes on in different other levels. So the right of individuals, for Kant, to access and to use external resources, including the right of individuals as I say to hold property, depends on a globally just framework of political relations and on everyone having the capacity to develop their moral agency.

So if we value freedom . . . in this kind of universal relational sense, the question of knowledge — which you might have thought I was going to answer — can’t actually be answered without the question of action. So if you think critically about the human from this systematic perspective, and if you think about reason in this critical way, the challenge of What can we know? is not separated from the challenge of what we should do . . . . And so that takes us to the next question that Kant poses with regard to the interest of reason, which is the question of What ought I do? — also incidentally the Lenin question . . . .

Lea Ypi, 2024 Benjamin Lectures, 1. ‘What Can I Know?’

Lea Ypi, 2024 Benjamin Lectures, 2. ‘What Should I Do?’

Lea Ypi, 2024 Benjamin Lectures, 3. ‘What May I Hope?’