“No political thought without political history” is the epigram that unites the works published in this series. Stephen Eric Bronner’s Socialism Unbound expands on this adage doubly His book explores the relation between contemporary socialist theory and the tradition from which it emerges. It argues that a valid ethics is possible only within the framework of a socialist politics, but that there can be no socialist politics without ethical responsibility.
What had previously “bound” socialism? Paradoxically, it was its vision of history as teleological that gave its adherents a blind faith in the material and moral inevitability of their victory. Relying on a one-sided reading of The Communist Manifesto, this teleological premise assumed that the long history of class struggles must move inexorably toward a final, titanic clash from which a true socialism will emerge freed from all conflict. This deterministic vision of history could be interpreted in diverse manners—as the chapters of Socialism Unbound illustrate. But the consequences were always devastating in theory as in practice. Above all, Bronner argues, this straightjacket binding socialism robbed it of both its experimental nature and its ethical conscience.
What then is the socialism that Stephen Eric Bronner wants to unbind? It is explained by means of an undogmatic and pluralistic understanding of a tradition, similar to the way in which political traditions such as liberalism have been understood. Hobbes and Locke are seen as contributing to a unified stream to which contemporary thinkers as different as Rawls, Nozik, and Taylor are heirs. Similarly, the socialist tradition has been shaped by thinkers as different as Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, V. I. Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. None of them possesses the truth about socialism, but each illuminates a new aspiration and confronts a new set of practical problems. Each of them also illustrates the limits and the contradictions of socialism.
The elimination of teleology and the reconstitution of a socialist tradition complement one another in Socialism Unbound. There is no single essence of socialism, no finally discovered form in which all contradiction is reconciled, no ultimate overcoming of individual and social alienation. Unbound from teleology and economic determinism, socialism becomes an ethical project undertaken in constantly changing social conditions. But this ethical project is not the product of a self-sufficient subject, living apart from the world and its vicissitudes. Such ethical purity separate from political responsibility refuses to recognize the weight of institutions. It becomes another teleological vision that seeks a utopia in which necessity is overcome and contradiction eliminated.
Socialism Unbound might appear at first glance to be a book for militants, an excited manifesto announcing new terrain to conquer, promising to unleash hidden forces that had lain dormant as existing types of socialism stagnated and finally went to their graves. But its readers will not unearth a true socialism that, like the “old mole” that Marx liked to invoke, has been silently digging its gallery of tunnels until capitalism has no solid earth on which to stand. The book is sober, critical of old verities, but unwilling to throw away the baby with the bathwater. That is why Socialism Unbound finds its place in the series Political Thought/Political History, alongside works by Claude Lefort (Complications), Pierre Rosanvallon (Democracy Past and Future), and Martin Breaugh (The Plebian Experience, forthcoming).
Dick Howard