Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant: On Liberal Democracy - Essay Example

I. Introduction The dilemma of political discontentment is distinctively oriented in the modern period can be clearly understood through a closer examination of the historical perception of liberty and democracy as these phenomena surface in the set of works of Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant. These two thinkers share a common initial emphasis in the philosophies of liberty and democracy that assumed on the task of identifying the modern period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Together with Hegel they pursue to reveal the processes establish in action by human conduct as purposeful and lasting rather than unintended and short-term, bringing to history, in Hegel’s personal design, “the belief and conviction that the realm of the will is not at the mercy of contingency” (Michaelis 1999, 537). The grand design of principle of history for Marx and Kant is of more direct importance. It becomes, undeniably, a requirement of action, devoid of which the concern in the future, so significant to their interpretation of modernity, cannot be persistent. Their works on the philosophy of liberty and democracy, occasioned by the disturbance of revolutionary anticipations, stand witness to an open effort either to control the experience of discontentment or to disallow it completely in the purposes of preserving the future configuration of modernity and the militant devotions that go behind (ibid). Writing in the repercussions of the French Revolution, when the processes of philosophy of history were merely starting to overpower political theory, scholars have charted their own distinctive path between the linear certainties of Kant’s insight of development and the dialectical certainties that Marx borrowed from Hegel. Marx and Kant respond to the catastrophic course of revolution through establishing the political as a dimension in which the species in its entirety trundles in the footsteps of the gods even as people endure the destiny of simple mortals (Fine 2001). Indeed, the more powerful the state, and hence the more political a nation is, the less probable it is predisposed to view in the state itself, that is in the contemporary structure of society whose dynamic, self-aware, and official articulation is the state, for the origin of social immoralities, and hence appreciate their common nature. Political intellect is political merely because it deliberates within the restrictions of politics. The sharper and more active it is the less competent it is of understanding social immoralities (Tate 2004). Therefore, it is important to closely examine the writings of Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant regarding the phenomena of liberty and democracy so as to clearly understand the pressure politics contributes to social evils. II. Karl Marx’s Liberalism and Democracy Does the breakdown of Stalinism in Eastern Europe mark the termination of history or the restoration of history, or the retribution of history? Most essential, the concept of history requires meticulous examination. More intriguingly, scholars have differed on what the circumstance is and what is established interpretively from arguments regarding the past, applying the terms obtained from past discourse. Indeed, the present is essentially merely the past as far as it has yet taken place. The past, obviously, is present as a matter of interpreted knowledge for every person, and firmly speaking the current instance is at all times retrospective (Michaelis 2002). Anticipations, anxieties and suggestions are made encouraging through the organizing of retrospection, otherwise referred to as history, and hence it is quite right to recommend the reinterpretation of Marx and also of democracy (ibid). Karl Marx was a democrat and the tradition would be enhanced if his memories were reclaimed as such. It is an intricate tradition, yet politicians discover it to their benefit to make things easier. Marx’s condemnation of bourgeoisie democracy was forceful, and they deserve reinterpretation to be certain if there has been any development since his time. Probably there has been less than people have guided to accept as true. Marx, and his political collaborator Engels, are primarily recognized in the contemporary period as revolutionaries, yet this feature of their assumption and practice has been remarkably exaggerated. This was accomplished by parties whose motives are against it, or are at least extremely unimportant to, the kind of democratic politics that the majority would find commonly reasonable (McCarthy 1990). Since Marx and Engels are celebrated nowadays as communists, it may seem surprising to associate that they advocated, in principle and in practice, domestic and global actions for democratic and responsible government. Nevertheless, it is also recognized in recent biographical works that they idolized the ideologies of the French Revolution and were, at least at the start of their careers, democrats in some unclear logic (ibid). A flysheet founded on the collaborative work entitled Communist Manifesto enumerating seventeen demands was massively circulated in Germany and in the German press, acquiring readers from London to Danube. Marx and Engels approved the document, which appealed for a unified German republic, parliamentary administration, collective suffrage, gratis legal service, abolition of feudal debts, absolute separation of power between the church and the state, free education, domestication of productive assets such as mines and communication, state-subsidized mortgages and housing, state regulation of banking and currency, assured means of subsistence and condition for the debilitated, reduction of the privilege of inheritance and the initiation of marked off rather than flat-rate taxation (Fine 2001). For the first time Marx and Engels carried over an actually thorough understanding of their own time to the democratic movement. The premature and unproductive ideas regarding the social and political progress of the world under which the democratic heads in all nations worked prior to 1848 have previously been stressed recurrently (ibid). The most important accomplishment which had been achieved in the discipline of social criticism in the democratic territory until then is, undeniably, Louis Blanc’s manuscript on the structure of labour. The works of Louis Blanc are remarkable as far as they illustrate the circumstances of the French workers at the time of the author. Blanc is an expert in portraying the demand of the French working class and conditions within the French context and society. He turned out to be doubtful, nevertheless, immediately as he endeavours into foreign history or the account of past eras, and he turned out to be utterly immature when he concerned himself with the common questions of economic and social progress (Michaelis 2002). Marx and Engels were the earliest democrats who desire to experiment without any basis. They understood their period, since they had incorporated all that the dominant theorists of the bourgeoisie had to assert regarding their own class. The English economists and the German philosophers had understood absolutely the characteristic of contemporary bourgeois society. Through situating the principles of Ricardo and Hegel at the welfare of the democratic revolution, Marx and Engels had discovered the hypothetical foundation which Louis Blanc lacked entirely (ibid). According to Marx and Engels, the most significant reality of modern progress was the industrial revolution which occurred in the eighteenth century. The bourgeoisie of contemporary times had amassed huge resources through colonial politics, global business, modern banks, an organization of administrative debts, and others. Simultaneously, the collapse of the feudal order and conventional agrarian situations had displaced massive masses of people, had ripped them out from the soil, and had pushed them into the urban areas. Through surpassing the obsolete techniques of production the wealthy bourgeoisie seized ownership of machine strategies in the course of the eighteenth century (McCarthy 1990). Hence, the new means of production, which were ultimate for society, were largely placed in the hands of the few, and the majority who were exploited and captured people were compelled to labour at the machines of the owners of the means of production or the capitalists (ibid). The acceptance of the principles of Marx would have indicated the emancipation of the democratic movement from all bourgeoisies or capitalists false impressions and primitiveness. The democratic parties would have become conscious regarding the essentiality of modern centralized industry, and they would have abandoned the uncertain bourgeoisie and collaborative experiments upon the taking in of power. Marx and Engels by no means maintained that the elimination of modern capitalism would be likely at one attempt of destruction. They themselves planned programs for a slow but sure shift from private to a communal economy (McCarthy 1990). The initial point of this whole development, nevertheless, could only be the triumph of the democratic revolution. Moreover, for Marx and Engels, the democratic movement, perceived as a whole, was an alliance of the labourers, the peasants, and the middle class. Within this alliance, nevertheless, the leadership must regress upon the industrial working class as a natural requirement. For merely the industrial labourers, due to their unique class status, were competent of liberating themselves from all the uncertainties and illusions from which the middle class endured; the more progressive the democratic movement became, the more would it be forced to surrender to proletarian dominance (ibid). If the Communists were skilled of providing the workers the appropriate catchphrases in the course of the revolution, then they could identify the rate and the path of the democratic revolution in spite of their insignificant number. With the absence of the democratic mass movement of the middle part of the nineteenth century, however, the whole Marxist assumption of revolution loses its foundation (Fine 2001). III. Immanuel Kant’s Liberal State Within liberal idea, individual privileges, freedoms, and legitimate securities of life and property were to be assured to individuals who are members of civil societies; specifically, societies that had been industrialized and pacified. The states appeared appropriately fit to protecting these priceless yet brittle societies were thought to be integrating democratic principles, constitutional limitations on the exercise of power, a prescribed separation of powers, standard elections and the constitution of law. The faith that merely liberal civil society was proficient in removing violence was corresponded by the not completely unproblematic belief that the liberal and democratic nations safeguarding them would carry out themselves peacefully. The significant assumption overriding this perspective was that global peace was a role of local social system. According to John Rawls, “peoples living under liberal constitutional democracies” (Flikschuh 2000, 407) are not inspired by “power or glory, or the... pride of ruling (ibid, 407)” have no enthusiasm in the “religious conversion of other societies (ibid, 407)” and in reality “have nothing to go to war about (ibid, 407)”. The local determination of global state action hence makes up one of the central assumption of liberal democracy. This assumption is paralleled by the perspective that merely after there has been global shift to states founded on representation, freedom, privileges and stable market economies will global peace becomes attainable. Non-representative or non-liberal nations are hence considered as unlimited in their actions while liberal states tolerate public scrutiny, pursue compromise, agreement or negotiation due to their domestic constitutions which determine the variety of alternatives governments can select from in seeking for overseas policy (Morgan 2000). For liberal thinkers, then, liberal and democratic states show pacific attitude in their relations, and the scholastic history of this perspective, and its alleged coherence, are habitually accounted to Immanuel Kant. According to Pagden (1998) for instance, Kant was a “formative figure in the history of modern international relations (9)” in exerting effort to develop an approach of norms and values competent of preserving a global peace. Kant is hence recognized as a thinker of a global peace founded on liberal and democratic norms (ibid). Even the disappointment to establish an international order on liberal and democratic norms has been espoused by his followers as substantiation that Kant must have been accurate. Fukuyama argues, for instance, that even the remarkable failure of actual restoration of the Kantian insight such as the League of Nations were severely erroneous simply by not abiding by Kant’s personal teachings properly (Tate 2004). In simple terms, if they had, such foundations would not have been intended at global peace between all nations, but merely between nations with republican constitutions, which Fukuyama easily assumes to imply liberal democracies. In contending so, Fukuyama and others showed an interpretation of Kant as a victor of both liberalism and democracy, and as the father of the democratic peace treatise (ibid). The fundamental principle in modern liberal assumption is that liberal-democratic nations do not wrestle with one another. As Fukuyama said, liberal democratic administrations show little doubt or motive in collective power since they share with one another premises of worldwide equality and privileges. Indeed, the tranquillity of liberal nations in their relations with other liberal nations has become nearly an unchallenged saying within liberal assumption (Tate 2004). IV. Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant on the Limits of Liberal Democracy In Kant’s writings, the responsibility to the future that rests at the core of the modern notion of history assumes the common form of a responsibility to enter the room of public discourse and movement; yet to enter it in an exceptionally specific manner. His precautions against making too many failures at the moment point people inevitably in the path of politics simultaneously as it compels people to take up politics in a manner that will not direct them into the type of failure from which people would be powerless to recover. But the contemporary sanction against failures is not foremost a sanction against the mistake of artificial or excessive expectations (Michaelis 2002). The philosophy of history on which Marx created his expectation of democratic revolution, for all of the philosophical and political space that it asserts to have journeyed from Kant, comes at strikingly similar judgements when it arrives to the question of failure. Indeed, Marx satisfies the Promethean objectives fundamental to the philosophy of liberty and democracy progressively more comprehensively than Kant. For all his recognitions to experimented history, Kant guides people to look far beyond the catastrophic unfolding of history on which people anticipations are tossed, and there, in the previous demands of reason, find out anchors for the faith that history is constantly progressing toward its objectives. Marx proclaims the more deep-seated position that it is accurately through this annihilation and catastrophe, not regardless of it, that expectations for a better world will be fulfilled (ibid). Whereas Kant’s philosophy of liberty and democracy leaves him detached and reluctant when faced with the realities of the French Revolution, Marx’s materialist framework of history never staggers or rambles off path. The immediate disappointment of the revolution is unswervingly confronted, but the likelihood that the anticipation of revolution might decisively be faced with failure can hardly even be visualized. Marx maintained vigilance against any contradictory inclinations among his fellow thinkers in the democratic movement, and never more so than in situation where the revolution seemed to be a distant or even unusual possibility (Chong 1999). Karl Marx recognizes liberal democracy in two ways. Primarily, as a method of sociological modernization, identified by abrupt social change with respect to an aggregate of historical processes related with industrialization and rationalization, which permanently demarcate the contemporary period from its ancient forerunners; secondly, he sees liberal democracy in a normative, coherent sense as an incomplete project, launched by the Enlightenment, where the objective of this project is liberation and which is occupied with the constraints or limit of the historical methods reflective of the first sociological perspective of liberal democracy, since they jeopardize these normative objectives (McCarthy 1990). Marx’s idea of liberal democracy was an incomplete project calls to this second normative idea of liberal democracy, a notion which had its most organized expression in Kant’s idea of an enlightened epoch (ibid). Hence, one can see that Marx is attempting to preserve a normative idea of liberal democracy which continues to extract inspiration from the historical framework of the Enlightenment, with its indispensable relation between rationality, liberation and change. Marx hence attempts to evade those powerful disparagements of reason, starting with Nietzsche, and until Weber, the Frankfurt School, Foucault and post-modernism commonly, which links reason with its contradiction, and reveal the Enlightenment’s principle of reason as in actuality a form of exploitation and supremacy (Michaelis 2002). V. Conclusion Liberal democracy was originally based on the Enlightenment idea that there are premises, available to unassisted rationality, showing that political existence should be committed to the safeguarding of rights to life, property, equality, free expression and speech, along with the freedom the espouse the religion of one’s preference. Not to mention the privilege to elect one’s political leaders, and seek one’s personal notion of contentment and happiness as long as the preferences made are consistent with the privileges of others and the public welfare (Pagaden 1998). People’s enlightenment forerunners may have provided various rationales for these privileges, a number basing them on theistic conception of God or nature, whereas others on the justifiable self-esteem of human beings, and still others on social usefulness regards; yet they commonly concurred that they were ultimately protected by one alternative or another of liberal democracy (ibid). In the dimension of historicist torrents of thought, as pioneered by Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant, that have weakened the conventional Enlightenment notions of liberal democracy, some scholars of the contemporary period have not chosen to restore notions with a more persuading form of justification. However, Marx and Kant have out stress behind a form of historicism that abandons the enduring features of human experience. And they have promoted a postmodern defence of western political foundations based on simple rhetorical claims rather than a pledge to truth and substantiation (Michaelis 2002). Accordingly, the two thinkers proclaims that people’s worldviews are influence by decisively reliant paradigms, and that the philosopher’s purpose is to trade a vision that he assumes is valuable to the community within which he incidentally happens to maneuver (ibid). The vision that Marx and Kant attempts vend to the liberal democratic societies of the Western Hemisphere involves a mixture of unlimited self-creation, the sustenance of egalitarian political activities and reallocation economics. References Chong, W. L., (1999), Combining Marx with Kant, Philosophy East & West , 120. Fine, R., (2001), Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, London: Routledge. Flikschuh, K., (2000), Kant and Modern Political Philosophy, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K., (1978), Theses on Feuerbach. In R. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader (p. 144), New York: W.W. Norton. McCarthy, G., (1990), Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy, Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Michaelis, L., (2002), The Wisdom of Prometheus: Kant, Marx, and Holderin on Politics, Disappointment and the Limits of Modernity, Polity , 537. Morgan, D., (2000), Kant Trouble: The Obscurities of the Enlightened, London: Routledge. Pagaden, A., (1998), The Genesis of Governance and Enlightenment Conceptions of the Cosmopolitan World Order, International Social Science Journal , 9. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, (1993), Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tate, J. W., (2004), Kant, Habermas and the Philosophical Legitimation of Modernity. Journal of European Studies , 281+. Read More