The Mountain and the Continental Road Race

Liberal democracy and socialist democracy

What exactly is the difference between socialism and liberalism?

Answering that question is more complicated that you might think, because there are so many different ways to go about it. I could, for example, talk about how socialists have tended to support public ownership and the welfare state, whereas liberals have historically invested themselves in 18th century ideas about private property. I might offer some crude and lazy distinction between “collectivism” and “individualism” — a move that’s particularly common on parts of the right. Or, to save time, I could simply give you a canned passage about the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early years of French Revolution.

My late friend Ed Broadbent, for his part, devised two useful metaphors¹ — respectively involving competitors in a continental road race and people trying to climb a mountain — to illustrate the difference between how liberals and socialists view society.

In the first, “individuals start out crossing the continent in winter, with each going their own way.” The objective, for the runners, is simply to beat out their competitors and obtain a reward commensurate with their performance. The role of the judges, and by extension the role of political and economic institutions, is merely to “set up and enforce the rules of the road”, ensuring a fair race but nothing else. A handful of competitors will come out on top, but many more will lose outright, and some will collapse from exhaustion by the side of the road.

In the second metaphor, however, life takes on a more co-operative and horizontal ethos:

All people start off at the foot of the mountain, each bound to one another. As they proceed up the mountain, they do so as a group. None gets ahead of the other and each is dependent on their fellows while making their own contribution. Occasionally, the climbers will take a break and untie the rope which links them. During this interlude some will go off by themselves; some will fish; some will write poetry; and others will make love. However, once the journey is resumed, they will link themselves together again and proceed up the mountain. The mountaintop, like the end of the continental road race, does not exist. Some of the mountaineers know this and some do not — but they all believe it is the climbing together that really counts.

If, for the liberal, human beings are fundamentally selfish and self-interested, justice and equality require no more or less than a series of evenhanded rules of the road.

Socialists, conversely, begin from the premise that human beings are born into obligation: as social beings possessed of their own advantages and disadvantages who choose neither their parents nor the position at which they enter life. Freedom for everyone thus requires more than the right to compete on equal terms in a competition that was never fair to begin with.

1. These first appeared in lectures delivered at Toronto’s York University in the late 1960s.