The socialist map has as its own stated goal the achievement of the most free and humane society in world history. Indeed, part of what distinguishes socialism is its unmatched sense of future potential as it self-consciously seeks to attain a form of politics that surpasses all prior regimes and epochs. Developed into a tradition during the nineteenth century, socialists expanded the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment beyond liberalism and individualistic rights. Where liberals often think of themselves as the peak of the Enlightenment, socialists instead argue that liberalism has not taken its own revolutionary promise and exercise of critical reason far enough. The Enlightenment itself needs to be further enlightened. New worlds must be created not yet charted on the liberal map.

One of the most distinctive features of socialism is its radical egalitarianism and vision of human flourishing, which it advances in the name of the entire species but especially the working class and the poor. Socialism is a form of radical humanism. Its primary nemesis in furthering its agenda is the capitalist system and its collaborators. Capitalism, on the socialist view, is not a unified society but a bundle of conflicting classes and alienated individuals manipulating one another in the pursuit of self-interest. What liberal capitalists call “freedom”, socialists instead see as a self-defeating egoism that leads to cyclical outbreaks of political, economic and ecological crisis.

Unlike classical liberals, socialists do not pit individual freedom and material equality against one another. To the contrary, personal emancipation is only possible in the socialist view if substantive material equality has been communally secured. This is because most forms of socialism define freedom as a kind of flourishing that includes not only the elimination of serious material privations but also the attendant education and leisure needed to exercise higher human capacities. Among these higher-order activities is participation in a cooperative, solidaristic community that is an alternative to capitalism's status quo of individuals and families competitively fending for themselves.