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Socialists, who are they? and liberalism, what is it? I shall choose here to signify as socialist those thinkers and spokesmen who cannot be faulted as tender toward authoritarian regimes: I shall exclude Communists, Maoists, Castroites, as well as their hybrids, cousins, and reticent wooers. I shall assume that with regard to liberalism there has been some coherence of outlook among the various shades of socialist (and Marxist) opinion. But in talking about liberalism I shall be readier to acknowledge the complexities and confusions of historical actuality. And this for two reasons: first, that liberalism is our main interest today; and second, that since a surplus of variables can paralyze analysis (eight kinds of socialism matched against six of liberalism yield how many combinations/ confrontations?), I would justify taking one’s sights from a more-or-less fixed position as a way of grasping a range of shifting phenomena.
In the socialist literature, though not there alone, liberalism has taken on at least the following roles and meanings:
Especially in Europe, liberalism has signifed those movements and currents of opinion that arose toward the end of the 18th century, seeking to loosen the constraints traditional societies had imposed on the commercial classes and proposing modes of government in which the political and economic behavior of individuals would be subjected to a minimum of regulation. Social life came to be seen as a field in which an equilibrium of desired goods could be realized if individuals were left free to pursue their interests.1 This, roughly, is what liberalism has signified in Marxist literature, starting with Marx’s articles for the Rheinische Zeitung and extending through the polemics of Kautsky, Bernstein, and Luxemburg. In short: “classical” liberalism.
Both in Europe and America, liberalism has also been seen as a system of beliefs stressing such political freedoms as those specified in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Rising from the lowlands of interest to the highlands of value, this view of liberalism proposes a commitment to “formal” freedoms—speech, assembly, press, etc.—so that in principle, as sometimes in practice, liberalism need have no necessary connection with, or dependence upon, any particular way of organizing the economy.
Especially in 20th-century America but also in Europe, liberalism has come to signify movements of social reform seeking to “humanize” industrial-capitalist society, usually on the premise that this could be done sufficiently or satisfactorily without having to resort to radical/ socialist measures—in current shorthand: the welfare state. At its best, this social liberalism has also viewed itself as strictly committed to the political liberalism of #2 above.
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