Marxism and Liberalism
Abstract
This article challenges the conventional historical narrative that treats Marxism as an extension or radicalization of liberalism, arguing instead that liberalism and socialism emerged as rival inheritances of a broader revolutionary process. Walker contends that liberalism should not be understood as the coherent philosophical foundation of modern emancipation, but as a retrospective ideological consolidation of those elements of the bourgeois revolutions that stabilized private property, representative government, civil society, and limits on popular sovereignty. Through an examination of the English, French, and American revolutionary traditions, the article emphasizes communistic, egalitarian, and proto-socialist tendencies embodied by figures and movements such as Thomas Müntzer, the Levellers, the Diggers, the sans-culottes, the Jacobins, and Babeuf, arguing that these currents represented a persistent revolutionary challenge to property-based domination. Walker further revisits thinkers conventionally absorbed into the liberal canon, including Locke, Paine, and Smith, to demonstrate that the intellectual history of modern emancipation cannot be cleanly divided according to later ideological categories. From this perspective, socialism does not merely complete liberalism but preserves and radicalizes the unresolved egalitarian aspirations of the revolutionary tradition, while liberalism functions as an ideological limitation placed upon that process. The article concludes by rejecting stage-based interpretations of Marxism according to which every society must first pass through a completed liberal-capitalist phase, instead emphasizing Marx and Engels’s conceptions of permanent revolution and multilinear historical development as resources for understanding socialism as the continuation of an unfinished struggle against class domination.
Keywords
Liberalism, Marxism, Popular Sovereignty, Revolution, Socialism
