There is no “after socialism.” There will not be in our or in our children's lifetimes an “after socialism.” In the wake of the Holocaust and the ruins of Nazism, anti-Semitism lay low a bit, embarrassed by its worst manifestation, its actual exercise of state dominion. In the wake of the collapse of Communism, socialism's only real and full experience of power, socialism too lays low for just a moment. Socialism's causes in the West, however, remain ever with us, the product of the convergence of two extraordinary achievements: liberal free enterprise and political democracy. The former creates wealth that has transformed all human possibility, but it also gives rise to particularly deep envy. The latter allows ambition a route to power by an appeal to the democratic state to seize and redistribute wealth in the name of social equality. As Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises understood perfectly, the bounty of free enterprise leads the unproductive to believe that such wealth is a fact of nature, there for the taking.

As it is currently understood, the notion of autonomy, both as something that belongs to human beings and human nature, as such, and also as the source or basis of morality (that is, duty), is bound up inextricably with the philosophy of Kant. The term “autonomy” itself derives from classical Greek, where (at least in surviving texts) it was applied primarily or even exclusively in a political context, to civic communities possessing independent legislative and self-governing authority. The term was taken up again in Renaissance and early modern times with similar political applications, but was applied also in ecclesiastical disputes about the independence of reformed churches from the former authority in religious matters of the church of the Roman popes. Kant's innovation consisted in conceiving of (finite) individual rational persons, as such, as lawgivers or legislators to themselves, and to all rational beings (or rather to all that are not perfect and holy wills), for their individual modes of behavior. For Kant, rational beings possess a power of legislating for themselves individually, according to which they each set their own personal ends and subject that selection, and their pursuit of the ends in question, to a universal principle, which is expressed in Kant's categorical imperative. The categorical imperative requires that one set one's own ends only within a framework that would warrant acceptance by all other such beings.

These epigraphs present us with part of the problem that is to be discussed in this essay. For Spinoza (1632–1677) there is no metaphysical freedom, except for God/Substance/Nature. The behavior of individual things, or modes, is completely a function of causes that bring about the behavior. This might suggest that there can be no autonomy in any meaningful sense either, thus aborting at the outset any talk of autonomy in Spinoza. To add to this problem, “autonomy” is somewhat anachronistic when applied to Spinoza. The philosophical theory surrounding the concept of autonomy seems to have developed later, perhaps mostly from Kant (1724–1804), which is not to say that it did not have parallels earlier. Kantian metaphysics is certainly different from Spinozistic metaphysics in allowing for freedom, if nothing else. But even if we ignore the metaphysics, the structure of a Kantian ethics is different from a Spinozistic one in its focus on duty and imperatives. One finds little of that in Spinoza. Consequently, on both metaphysical and historical grounds, it seems somewhat problematic to speak of Kantian autonomy in Spinoza.

While no one has yet announced the death of capitalism, reports of its imminent demise have been as numerous as they have been exaggerated. Such reports have usually been bolstered by thoughtful analyses of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, which was expected to come sliding—if not crashing—down under the weight of its own inconsistencies. Leaving aside Karl Marx's own predictions, twentieth-century analysts as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter, Daniel Bell, and Jurgen Habermas have asserted that the contradictions of capitalism could only mean that its days were numbered. Alas, all that has been established by these analyses is that predictive failure is no impediment to market success: either the consumer's demand for such theories of capitalism's failures is naturally robust, or supply continues to generate its own demand.

“The idol of communism, which spread social strife, enmity and unparalleled brutality everywhere, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed.” These words, spoken by Russian president Boris Yeltsin before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1992, brought a tumultuous response from America's political leaders. The evocation of the theme of idolatry by a former member of the Communist Party was striking, all the more so because it must have called to his listeners' minds the dramatic scenes of the destruction of the statues of Lenin then taking place throughout the Communist world. Nothing of the kind had been seen since the end of the Pagan era, when temples of the old gods were toppled throughout the Roman Empire. The events that historian Edward Gibbon, in his classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described as happening in Alexandria in A.D. 389 might just as well have applied to what was happening in Minsk or Tirana: “The huge idol [of Serapis] was overthrown and broken into pieces, [its] limbs ignominiously pulled through the streets.

We all know what Kant means by autonomy: “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition)” (G, 4:440), or, since any law must be universal, the condition of an agent who is “subject only to laws given by himself but still universal” (G, 4:432). Or do we know what Kant means by autonomy? There are a number of questions here. First, Kant's initial definition of autonomy itself raises the question of why the property of the will being a law to itself should be equivalent to its independence from any property of objects of volition. It is also natural to ask, how does autonomy as Kant conceives it relate to more familiar notions of freedom. For example, consider Locke's conception of freedom as the condition of a person “to think, or not to think; to move, or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind,” rather than according to the preference or direction of any other person. What is the relation between autonomy and this traditional conception of freedom as the liberty of an agent? And what is the relation of autonomy to the traditional conception of freedom of the will; that is, the condition that obtains, as G. E.

Socialism, understood as the rejection of markets based on private property in favor of comprehensive centralized economic planning, is no longer a serious political option. If the core of capitalism is the organization of the economy primarily through market competition based on private property, then capitalism has certainly defeated socialism. Markets have been accepted—and central planning abandoned—throughout most of the Third World and in most of the formerly Communist states. In the advanced industrial states of the West, Labor and “democratic socialist” parties have rejected socialism, by deregulating markets and privatizing industries, utilities, and transport. The U.K. Labour Party's 1945 manifesto declared the party to be a “Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate aim is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain.” Today the Labour Party insists that markets are a given.

Autonomy generally is a valued condition for persons in liberal cultures such as the United States. We uphold autonomous agents as the exemplar of persons who, by their judgment and action, authenticate the social and political principles and policies that advance their interests. I will begin by examining the concept of autonomy in Section II of this essay. In Section III, I will explore the idea that autonomy is valued because autonomous agents are persons whose judgment and actions serve to advance their interests in a democratic society. But the focus of this essay is on the phenomenon, which is not implausible in a culture such as that of the United States, of being “blinded” by the ideal of autonomy. What happens if we value autonomy too much?

For the past three decades philosophical discussions of both personal autonomy and what it is for a person to “identify” with her desires have been dominated by the “hierarchical” analyses of these concepts developed by Gerald Dworkin and Harry Frankfurt. The longevity of these analyses is owed, in part, to the intuitive appeal of their shared claim that the concepts of autonomy and identification are to be analyzed in terms of hierarchies of desires, such that it is a necessary condition for a person to be autonomous with respect to (to identify with) a desire that moves her to act, that she desires that this desire so move her. (Conversely, on these analyses, a person will not be autonomous with respect to a desire that she is moved by, she will not identify with it, if she does not want to be so moved.) Despite the intuitive appeal of these analyses, however, Irving Thalberg has argued that they should be rejected. This is because, he argues, a person who is forced to perform an action by being subjected to duress of a certain degree of harshness will desire to be moved by her desire to submit. Thus, he continues, the proponents of hierarchical analyses of autonomy and identification will be forced to hold that such a person acted willingly, and did not suffer from any impairment in her autonomy. This, Thalberg concludes, is so counterintuitive as to justify rejecting hierarchical analyses.

What, if anything, is left of the socialist project? One way of interpreting this question is to ask whether socialism has bequeathed any permanent legacy to the capitalist democracies—do they have any features that would not exist apart from the historical impact of socialism, and that positively reflect socialist values? If we assume, with the political consensus of the moment, that full-blown socialism no longer represents a possible programme for these democracies, perhaps we can still discover the remains of socialism embedded in their practices. Or maybe not—that is the question I want to address.

In autonomous action the agent herself directs and governs the action. But what is it for the agent herself to direct and to govern? One theme in a series of articles by Harry G. Frankfurt is that we can make progress in answering this question by appeal to higher-order conative attitudes. Frankfurt's original version of this idea is that in acting of one's own free will, one is not acting simply because one desires so to act. Rather, it is also true that this desire motivates one's action because one desires that this desire motivate one's action. This latter desire about the motivational role of one's desire is a second-order desire. It is, in particular, what Frankfurt calls a second-order “volition.” And, according to Frankfurt's original proposal, acting of one's own free will involves in this way such second-order, and sometimes yet higher order, volitions.

Two related themes have dominated discussions about the Left in advanced industrial democracies in recent years. The first is that an increasingly integrated world economy is creating a fundamentally new situation for leaders and publics, imposing burdens and constraining choices. You can either opt out of the system and languish, or put on what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has called neoliberalism's “Golden Straightjacket”—at which point “two things tend to happen: your economy grows and your politics shrinks.” The second is that traditional social democracy has played itself out as a political ideology, creating a vacuum that can and should be filled by some new progressive movement with greater contemporary relevance. For example, Ralf Dahrendorf has argued that “socialism is dead, and … none of its variants can be revived,” while Anthony Giddens has written that reformist socialism has become “defensive” and perhaps even “moribund.”

Reason has co-opted our conception of autonomy. My purpose is to set autonomy free. Here is the problem: some philosophers, Kant most notably, have said that governing your life by reason or by being responsive to reason is the source of autonomy. But there is a paradox concealed in these plausible claims. On the one hand, a person can be enslaved to reason and lack autonomy because of this kind of bondage. On the other hand, if reason has no influence, then it appears that one would be the slave of one's passions, and, however eloquently Hume might have written about reason being the slave of the passions, there is something odd about the idea that a person who is enslaved by his passions is autonomous. The paradox, which I shall call the paradox of reason, is that if we are governed by reason in what we choose, then we are in bondage to reason in what we choose, and we are not autonomous. Yet, if we are not governed by reason, then we do not govern ourselves in what we choose, and again we are not autonomous.

For this collection entitled “After Socialism,” we were asked to reflect upon such questions as what rectifications (if any) to present market capitalist systems might be desirable and whether there is any viable remnant in the socialist ideal that ought to be preserved. My basic answer to the latter is that the socialist principle of distribution “From each according to abilities, to each according to needs” remains a compelling moral ideal, superior to the resigned, complacent, or enthusiastic acceptance of economic inequality that is offered by defenders of conventional capitalism and by many versions of liberalism. And so, my answer to the former is that the rectifications to present market capitalist systems that would be desirable would be to reduce the deep injustices and social malformations of these systems as much as possible by moving their distributive outcomes in the direction of the socialist ideal.

The collapse of Communism and the retreat from, in theory as well as practice, even moderate forms of collectivism have left even the non-Marxist forms of socialism in disarray. While it is true that forms of collectivism have remarketed themselves under meretricious, insubstantial doctrinal headings such as the “Third Way,” an unstable amalgam of capitalism, communitarianism, and welfarism, there has been little original work on how an economy and society might organize itself so as to have neither the superficially objectionable features of modern capitalism nor the economically untenable and morally odious properties of full-blooded socialism. The former might include vast inequality in resource ownership, the unequal political power such inequality might generate, the increasing alienation produced by the soulless possessive individualism that is allegedly engulfing the world, and a myriad of other complaints that are regularly leveled at capitalism.

Autonomy, we suppose, is self-regulation or self-direction. There is a distinct idea that is easily confused with self-direction, namely, self-expression, self-fulfillment, or self-realization. (I do not mean to suggest that the latter three terms are all synonymous. But in this essay, whatever differences there are among them play no role, so I will use them interchangeably.) Although it will turn out paradoxically that autonomy is neither self-regulation nor self-realization, it is reasonable to suppose that the former is a superior candidate. My teacher of Indian religion, Dr. Subodh Roy, blind from birth, chose not to undergo an operation that would have made him sighted because he believed, perhaps rightly, that the ability to see would interfere with his religious quest. He thereby chose not to realize one of his fundamental human capacities, one whose cultivation has produced some of the finest fruits of civilization. Joseph Raz describes a case in which a man places his life in jeopardy by undertaking a trip to deliver medical aid to a group of people in a distant place. Since he will be unable to secure food for several days, he, in effect, subordinates one of his own basic needs or interests to a goal that he deems more important. There is no reason to believe that, in refusing to express or realize a dimension of self, either Dr. Roy or Raz's philanthropist have failed to act autonomously.

I undertake three tasks in this exploratory essay. First, I examine some of the lessons of recent history concerning the relation between socialism, markets, and liberal democracy. Second, I lay out the basic theoretical building-blocks of an alternative to both socialism and laissez-faire that I call “mutualism.” Finally, I draw some conclusions for public policy and practice, in the form of what I call a “progressive market strategy.” A brief conclusion ponders the question, What's left of socialism?

The notions of autonomy and self-governance each capture something crucial about the moral dimensions of agents and actions. These notions are central to the ways in which we conceptualize ourselves and others. The concept of autonomy is especially crucial to understanding the distinct status of moral agents. For its part, self-governance has a significant relation to the evaluation of agents as individuals with particular characters, leading particular sorts of lives, and performing particular actions. Neither notion—autonomy nor self-governance—fully assimilates or dominates the other. Moreover, there are some important strains between them. There are certain forms of regard that the autonomy of an agent demands that are at odds with what an agent's exercise of self-governance merits. In this essay I plan to show this, and offer a diagnosis of why this is the case.

If socialism and liberalism are rivals, one ambition these rivals have shared is that of being a transnational, even universal doctrine. Socialists and liberals have each thought of their own view as being well designed to expand, to reach out and be taken up in an ever-growing number and variety of societies. I do not know whether now is the time to write the final obituary for the socialist version of this dream. But the universalizing dream most vivid before the minds of the inhabitants of the world today clearly is not the socialist one, but the liberal one. “Globalization,” in our day, has come to mean something very close to “liberalization.” For some this is a cause of celebration; for others, it is a cause of protest and despair.

I will argue that the autonomy of a particular act of a particular person depends on the pattern of behavior in which it is embedded. I call this conditional autonomy. A person's act is conditionally autonomous or not, relative to other acts at other times. Consider an example of a person crossing the street. On the one hand, this act might not be done for its own sake, but may fit into some ongoing long-term behavioral pattern that is personally beneficial to the person crossing the street—such as regularly buying groceries in the supermarket (which happens to be across the street). On the other hand, crossing the street might be done simply for its own sake. If such an act were considered to be autonomous, regardless of its temporal context, its autonomy would be unconditional. However, I will argue that whereas conditional autonomy is a highly useful social concept, indeed a necessary concept, for any human society, unconditional autonomy is a useless concept that actually impedes our efforts to understand and explain human behavior.