It is one of the valuable insights of the Marxist tradition that ideas, desires, choices, actions, series of actions, histories, etc., are all socially conditioned, embedded in relationships and networks of relationships. Individuals are free and responsible for their own actions; but they are not the sole causes of their own actions. Others are also responsible, if not morally, at least physically or socially for those actions. Moreover, the reverse is also true: individual ideas, choices, and actions, etc., have a causal power that extends beyond the individual into the network of social relations in which he is embedded. The common good affects, and is affected (i.e. more or less achieved) by, individual choices.

What is right or wrong for a given individual cannot be entirely separated from the social situation which that individual inhabits, i.e. the place in the hierarchy of social order to which he belongs. But what is more, how the individual thinks of his actions as right or wrong, or in any way normative, or of what kind, or how he chooses them, is a sign and effect of the kind of social relations in which he participates. The knowledge that he possesses, or the ignorance, is largely a function of the kind of society which he inhabits, its traditions and customs, its hierarchies and power relations, etc.

What an individual regards as normal in his life, the kinds of interactions which he engages in, the choices he makes, his habits and customs, etc; these are not solely the result of his own free choosing (though they are the result of it). They are also the result of the options and alternatives made available to him by his social environment.

Liberal modernity in its original form was largely a revolution against a social order which consisted of networks of dependent relations. Liberalism sought to free individuals from relations in which they were dependent, since it saw such dependency as simultaneously enslaving and inegalitarian: to be dependent on another is to be unfree, but also subordinate to the other. Hierarchical social relations were disdained, and liberalism sought instead to instate the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Whereas previously individuals relied upon others, and upon authority and tradition in particular, for guidance and wisdom; and whereas previously they sought their perfection in being members of a social order that was greater than themselves; liberalism by contrast sought to liberate the individual from such constraints of subordination and participation, exalting the individual instead into a free man, an independent man, a man able to rely solely upon himself and his own powers of reason and creativity for knowledge and success in the world. Hence the liberal man has no need of teachers, no need of authority, no need of religious leadership, no need of tradition, no need of external guidance, no need of law; he has only himself, he is the proprietor of his own destiny.

Liberalism produced many advancements for mankind — this cannot be doubted. Rationalist philosophy paved the way for scientific and technological innovation of an unprecedented degree. The fruits of such innovation were marketed to the citizens of the new free society to be used and enjoyed purely at their own discretion — because, as liberal citizens they were now expected to be fully and equally able to rely upon their own rational capacities to use these fruits to their own benefit, as defined by each man for himself. Through the eyes of liberalism, the pre-liberal peasant living in dependence upon the wisdom and guidance of his lord, his guild-master, his priest, his bishop, his king, his pope, etc., was under a condition of slavery and unfreedom, on account of such dependence. By contrast, the liberal citizen is believed to be truly free, independent, his own caretaker, having obligations to no one — and being the recipient of no one’s obligations, except those who have illiberally enslaved him and thus offended his rights and freedoms.

But in actual fact, men under the regime of liberal capitalism are not free; nor are they, in any meaningful factual sense, equal. This latter point — the insistence on the naturalness of human hierarchy and inequality — is one of the insights of the Conservative tradition. Men are not particularly equal; hierarchy comes natural to them, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. But the natural inequalities among individuals — on account of either their inherent dispositions or the favorability of their circumstances — produce deep unfreedoms when they are not bound by social obligations of acknowledged dependence. Those individuals who, being favored by chance circumstances (most of which are, in fact, social circumstances), are able to reap the greatest benefits from scientific and technological advancement, are deceived by liberalism into thinking that they do not, as any consequence of their higher social status, bear any obligations towards those who are less able to reap those benefits. The privileged under liberalism, or those who are “successful” (the classes of wealthy or political elites), fail to acknowledge that others depend on them. But liberalism also teaches this same heedlessness of dependency to those who are less fortunate, the poor, those who struggle, etc; they are taught that they are equally as free as their superiors who ignore them, and that their success in the world is their own responsibility, and no other’s.

Liberalism is, at its core, a denial of the fundamental role of social relations in shaping the lives of every individual in society. After all, individuals who are free and equal, and equally free, have no real need of each other, sharing nothing in common but the abstract ideals of equality and freedom. But in reality, these ideals are false, and have produced not merely unfreedom and inequality, but an inequality where the unequal persons and classes in society avoid each other, do not help each other, do not acknowledge their obligations to each other, do not care for each other as dependents, or cannot as dependents truly rely upon each other — because they are taught to believe they have no need to do so, being all equally free anyway.

Of course, liberalism itself produces a certain kind of social organism, built up of a certain kinds of social relations, and as always these social relations are deeply explanatory of the moral, psychological, epistemic, and physical conditions of individuals. The existence of social inequality without acknowledged social dependence is itself a social condition, a condition of social relations. Inequality, of course, cannot be done away with; it is even good, if it is at peace with itself in the context of a social order of mutual ties of obligation and dependence. If it is not at peace with itself, however, and it is constituted of social relations of individuals in denial of their ties of obligation and dependence, then inequality can become a great social evil.

The modern anti-liberal must learn a double lesson, one from the conservative tradition and another from the Marxist or more broadly socialist tradition — and these two lessons are, in fact, deeply intertwined. The conservative tradition reminds us of the goodness of inequality, when it is rightly formed and rightly ordered. The Marxist tradition reminds us that the conditions of individuals and the trajectories of their lives are also *social* conditions and trajectories, a function of complex social relationships. Where these two insights must join to be united is in the further insight that hierarchies of mutual obligation and dependence are themselves social in nature. The conservative can be checked by the Marxist from falling into liberal individualism, making “hierarchy” into just another excuse to abstain from evaluating unequal and possibly unjust social relations. The Marxist can be checked by the conservative from falling into the egalitarianism with which liberalism itself began, as an excuse to abstain from the virtues of dependency, submission, and obedience. Unchecked by each other in these ways, the conservative and the Marxist alike become mere liberals, failing in their original anti-liberal intent.