Post-modernism, the Return to Ethics and the Crisis of Socialist Values

Abstract

Socialist orthodoxy has been eclipsed as a transformatory project for the establishment of the good life. Here, ethics and politics slid beneath statist administrative goals, or socialists simply adopted liberal values. However, liberalism has not achieved complete hegemony, and is open to a number of objections - its individualism, its partial conception of freedom, the obvious failures of the market, and the exclusions of liberal democracy. On the other hand, communitarian particularism is also found wanting. Neither does post-modernism provide a solution to the current crisis of values, nor does it simply replace socialism as an ethical horizon for those committed to emancipatory values. I argue that some of the problems of these paradigms can be overcome by alternatives from within the libertarian tradition. In particular, propounding an 'ethics of emancipation' - equal freedom for all, achieved through solidaristic revolutionising of macro social structures - libertarians have sought the establishmen...