The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the 2025 New York City Mayoral election has propelled discussion of socialism to the front of the political agenda. Mamdani identifies his political outlook as a form of democratic socialism, and while he drew support from many who would have viewed themselves as liberals, he has also faced vociferous attacks from those who see socialism as a dangerous departure from the political center. Stepping behind these current political debates, there are deeper political questions worth exploring: What is the fundamental relationship between liberalism and socialism? Are these two political traditions ideological opponents, or can they be allies in a broader struggle against injustice and unfreedom?
In our recent paper on the relationship of liberalism and socialism, we sought to make progress on these questions by examining the encounter between two canonical representatives of these two traditions: Karl Marx and John Rawls. There is often a strong degree of mutual hostility between the partisans of each thinker. Marxists often view figures such as Rawls as apologists for the status quo, while many liberals associate Marx with political positions that have too often practiced oppression while preaching emancipation. Nevertheless, the canonical representatives of these two traditions have more in common than commentators generally realize. Perhaps most significantly, we suggest that Rawls himself, who worked hard to place his own thinking in the history of political philosophy, also misunderstood his relationship to Marx’s views, and came to overestimate the scope of their disagreements.
To substantiate these claims, we focus on three points of comparison between Marx and Rawls. The first concerns what might be called the limits of liberal rights. In his essay “On the Jewish Question”, Marx argues that the “the rights of man”—“equality, liberty, security, property”—presuppose an atomistic view of human relations that is antithetical to true freedom and community; while the “rights of the citizen”—which offer rights to political participation—are “merely formal” in the sense that although they are held by all citizens equally, the rights are not enjoyed by all citizens equally on account of the deep inequalities of power and wealth under which these rights are exercised. In his discussion of this criticism in Justice as Fairness, Rawls defends liberal rights from Marx’s critique. But what is interesting about Rawls’s response is that he does not defend traditional liberal rights as such, but rather shows how Marx’s criticisms do not apply to his own specific interpretation of liberal rights, which are based not on atomistic view of human relations, but on a vision of free and equal citizens participating in the shared project of realizing and sustaining a cooperative social system. In doing so, Rawls tacitly accepts that Marx’s criticism of the limits of liberal rights has considerable force against more atomistic versions of liberalism that lack the special features of Rawls’s views.
The second point of comparison concerns issues of alienation and self-realization in work. In his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx argues that capitalism alienates workers from their labor, depriving them of the good of self-realization in work. Here Rawls argues that the problem Marx identifies can only be overcome within a seriously egalitarian liberal regime, for it is only within such a regime that workers would enjoy the bargaining power to push for better working conditions and to be able to identify with their social order in a way that overcomes the problem of alienation. Again, then, Rawls’s response tacitly accepts that forms of liberalism that lack his own ambitious egalitarianism would fall foul of Marx’s critique.
While Rawls’s response to the limits of liberal rights is straightforwardly convincing, we believe that Rawls’s response to Marx’s concerns with alienation is more contestable, and raises some deep and difficult issues. While it is plausible that the problem of alienation would be mitigated under the seriously egalitarian form of liberalism that Rawls envisions, it is unclear that alienation in work would cease to be a problem, both because increased bargaining power may be insufficient to counteract market pressures to produce in highly alienating ways, and because people may choose to trade work quality against other goods. At the same time, Rawls’s idea that alienation can be overcome via identification with the broader achievements of cooperative social production may prove too much, in that it could threaten to justify even a worryingly in-egalitarian division of labor. Here, highly surprisingly, it is Rawls whose view may seem excessively collectivist, in contrast to a Marxian view that is more concerned with the interests of each individual.
The third point of engagement concerns the place of justice under communism. Rawls followed G.A. Cohen in seeing Marxian communism as a society “beyond justice” in the sense that one of the circumstances that gives rise to the problem distributive justice—scarcity of resources—would have been surpassed. On this view, a “technological fix” enables everyone to take whatever they may want from the common stock of resources. Where Cohen criticized this view on ecological grounds, Rawls argues that it is ‘undesirable as such’ on account of its transcendence of our concern for others: on Rawls’s view, this ‘evanescence of justice’ is not only unachievable but would itself be an expression of a form of alienation from one another.
While this may seem like a significant difference between Marx and Rawls, Rawls’s criticism is based on a misinterpretation of Marx’s position on justice under communism. In the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, Marx talks of communism as moving beyond “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right.” Contra Cohen and Rawls, this transcendence is intended not only a transformation of the productive forces, but also a transformation of the individual and their motivations, as people come increasingly to pursue their self-realization in ways that contributes to the flourishing of others. On this view, a post-capitalist society would not move beyond justice in the sense that individuals no longer have to attend to each other’s needs; rather, they would realize a just distribution of resources precisely because they attend to others’ needs spontaneously and without coercion. Understood this way, the criticism that Marxian communism involves an undesirable transcendence of concern for others is shown to be misdirected. Hence the distance between Marx and Rawls here is much less than Rawls imagined.
What does this exploration of the relationship between Rawls and Marx tell us about the relation between liberalism and socialism? Our discussion offers some support for the idea that liberalism and socialism can be allies, as much of Marx’s critique of capitalism can be endorsed by Rawlsian liberals, while Rawls’s critique of Marx can be dissolved when we free ourselves of the effects of some unfortunate misreading that misdirected Rawls in his engagement with Marx’s ideas. Yet, while our discussion of Marx and Rawls suggests that (egalitarian) liberalism and socialism should not be seen as fundamentally opposed to one another, we also believe that there are genuine normative disagreements between these two traditions, for example regarding alienation and self-realization in work, and about the malleability of human nature. On the view we develop in our article, liberalism and socialism are neither unplacatable opponents nor seamlessly reconciled, but two sibling political traditions, each with the resources to critique the failures of capitalism, which share more than they realize—not least their shared tendency to overestimate their distance from one another.
By way of conclusion, consider a recent blog post on Rawls and Marxism by Joseph Heath. Heath argues that Rawls killed off Marxism in political philosophy—“by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.” In some ways, Heath is on to something: we agree that Rawls’s theory of justice plausibly evades many Marxian worries about liberal political positions. Once we see that Marxist critiques that were aimed at classical liberalism lose their force against the more egalitarian form of Rawlsian liberalism, some of the reasons for opposing liberalism melt away. However, Heath’s characterization of Rawls as “triumphing” over Marxism is misplaced—not merely because important normative differences persist, and hence talk of Marxism’s demise is premature, but more crucially because Rawls avoids Marxist objections precisely by incorporating Marxian insights into his liberal theory of justice. Rather than seeing Rawls and Marx as adversaries, a more productive approach would instead recognise the extent to which Rawls builds on some of the hard-won insights of the Marxist tradition, just as Marxists can benefit from the insights of Rawlsian liberalism.
Jan Kandiyali
Jan Kandiyali is Associate Professor in Political Theory at Durham University. His book, Flourishing Together: Karl Marx’s Vision of the Good Society (Oxford University Press), will be published in 2026.
Martin O'Neill
Martin O’Neill is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York. His discussion of John Rawls on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time programme can be found here.
