Rousseau, Marx, and the Critique of Classical Liberalism - Essay Example

? Rousseau, Marx, and the Critique ical Liberalism Introduction Many thinkers tried to overcome the shortcomings of the liberal and to implement a genuine democracy, in other words, the concept of collectivist democracy. This type of democracy in theory was designed in sufficient detail. Attempts to its implementation, made primarily in the socialist states failed. Yet, they significantly enriched the theory and practice of democracy (though mostly with negative experience) and had a significant influence on the modern political system. This collectivist democracy is often called identitary. This name reflects the fact that it comes from the integrity of the people (nation, class), the presence of single will before the act of its public expression, and identity of the will and actions of the authorities. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx are the most prominent representatives of this theory of democracy. Rousseau’s Political Philosophy Idealizing the natural state, a kind of “golden age,” Rousseau believed that the civil state must guarantee the recovery of natural equality of man in the form established by the contract freedoms. Rousseau is considered the father of the classical theory of democracy, since he introduced the idea of popular sovereignty. By creating a state, people do not put themselves under the authority of the sovereign, but become the bearers of the supreme power. Considering the sovereignty of the people as indivisible, he opposed the division of sovereignty between any of the bodies. The legislature cannot be transferred to parliament, and must be carried out directly by the people. All laws are created by the common will of the people. Rousseau’s criticism of liberalism manifested itself most profoundly in the interpretation of the equality problem. Rousseau distinguishes between legal equality—or formal equality—and de facto equality. Legal equality does not entail de facto equality, which, according to Rousseau, is the equality of wealth. This is the difference between democracy and liberalism. Liberalism recognizes only legal equality. Democratic equality of all people is the equality of conditions of economic management. The usual liberal fallacy is that there can be no equality between people, because people actually are not equal: one is short and another is tall, one is strong and another is weak, etc. And it would be unfair, according to ideologues of liberalism, if a fool and a wise man were equal. Rousseau, for all his “naturalism”, argues differently. By nature, he says, all people are equal. This does not mean that the strong and the weak are equal in strength. In physical strength they are not equal. But they are equal in the right to live. And if this equality is recognized, the strong will help the weak to survive. And then the weak will feel equally strong. But the strong can hurt the weak. And he can take advantage of the weakness of another person in order to subjugate him, to make him work in order to get rich, etc. Similarly, a stupid person can be treated in different ways: one can sympathize with his stupidity, but one can take advantage of his stupidity to deceive him for one’s own selfish purposes. According to Rousseau, natural inequality is compounded by the inequality in the social conditions of life. And the actual inequality of men is manifested primarily in the inequality of social conditions. That is why humanism in modern society should create equal conditions for healthy people and the most hopeless people with disabilities. Though it could be possible, with reference to their “inferiority”, simply to reject physically defective people, or enclose them in special reservations. Modern society has become so rich that it can afford to be humane. At the time of Rousseau, it was not so rich. Rousseau proclaimed the need for the actual equality of all people in the society, which was still very far from the economic state when equality could be achieved. Rousseau can be accused of utopianism. But without such utopians our society would doom itself to stagnation. Rousseau saw inequality in the social conditions of life primarily in the sphere of property: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody” (“On the Origin of Inequality: Second Part”). Unlike other theorists of natural law, Rousseau did not consider the right of property as natural, but as a social and historical. According to him, it is impossible to imagine property outside the circle of relations created by production. Property is not only a “natural” relation, it is not even merely a legal relation, but it is the relation of production. And this is the manifestation of Rousseau’s historicism. This historicism led directly to the historicism of Hegel and Marx. Rousseau’s historicism was also manifested in the fact that he considered human society as something more than a purely animal association. Rousseau believed that society has a common will, which is embodied in the state and is not simply the aggregate of all people’s will. His thought is far superior compared to the positivist idea of the common will resulting from the addition of individual wills. The latter idea cannot explain why people at some point have similar goals. To explain this, Rousseau recognizes autonomous historical laws, autonomous not only in relation to nature, but also autonomous with respect to each separate individual. And every single individual in one way or another is forced to align his will with the universal will, which in antiquity was realized by people in the form of inevitable fate and divine destiny. Rousseau could not be a materialist, because materialism is associated with the denial of God and religion. For Rousseau, this meant denial of the foundations of human morality. This is the root of his differences with the philosophers of the materialistic sense, such as Marx. Marx’s Revolutionary Ideas Marx—as well as Rousseau—was one of the most consistent and determined critics of liberalism. Liberalism, according to Marx, as a form of capitalism must be unconditionally put to the same place as capitalism itself – to the scrapyard of history. Marx had a very definite conception of justice, which coincided with the communist ideal. Communism, according to him, is a society in which the all-round development of personality is the supreme principle and purpose. Accordingly, everything that interferes with this goal was criticized by Marx. The capitalist and liberal society is unfair for the reason that: It does not provide the most complete development of the productive forces and as a consequence the completeness of satisfaction of needs and happiness. It represents the society in which exploitation of man by man is permitted. It represents the society in which there is alienation of man. These three charges make three main interrelated lines of criticism of liberal justice. In criticizing liberalism from the point of view of the laws of social development Marx first of all had in mind three laws. It is the law of the correspondence of productive relations and the level of development of productive forces, the law of succession of social economic formations and the law of increasing requirements. According to the first law, human history is nothing but a succession of changing means of production, when every next means is the progressive development of the first one. Production relations are changing as a result of the continuing development of the productive forces. The rapid development of productive forces within the capitalist social economic structure constantly leads to new contradictions within each method of production. Sooner or later the bourgeois relations of production will be unable to ensure the steady development of the productive forces. As Marx writes, “Capitalism is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him (“Manifesto of the Communist Party”). The main drawback of capitalism is not merely that it is unable to further develop the productive forces. The development of the productive forces requires changing the character of needs. According to Marx, with the victory of communism basic material needs will be fully satisfied and another need becomes actual – the need for comprehensive development of personality through creative work. It is for this reason the prehistory of mankind ends with communism and a true history begins. Destroying private property for the means of production the proletariat not only reaches its own material interests, but also creates the basis for the subsequent crisis-free development of society. Capitalism and liberalism are criticized not only for being an outdated model of social structure, but also for being unfair. Elementary and blatant injustice of liberalism lies in its inseparable connection with the exploitation of man by man, which has a systematic and institutionalized character and receives ideological support and justification on the part of liberalism. Following Rousseau, Marx argues that the relations of mutual exploitation arise with the appearance of property. These relations become systemic and institutionalized with the emergence of commodity relations and money. Under capitalism, or, equivalently, civil society, the mutual exploitation is the main principle of relations among all members of society. Communism, on the other hand, “deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations” (“Manifesto of the Communist Party”). Marx argues that in the course of employment the worker confronts another worker; the capitalist confronts the other capitalist. Bourgeois society is a society split by contradictions. Competition is the external determining factor which prevents the individual to consider the other as a colleague and assistant; society is disturbed by a relentless “war of all against all.” Another kind of critique of liberal theories contained in Marx’s doctrine is based on the concept of alienation. The concept of alienation in Marx’s works is quite contradictory, complicated, and is the subject of debate. Alienation, according to Marx, is creation of the special social conditions under which the results of human activities become not only alien, but even hostile to man. Alienation becomes more visible and inclusive in capitalist society. People living in conditions of alienation become crippled “partial individuals” and undeveloped beings. In this sense, liberal capitalism means the triumph of the inhuman conditions of social life over the human conditions. Certain forms of social life are more perfect than others, and should be approved, while others should be restricted or eliminated. This directly contradicts liberalism, which insists on the equivalence of all forms of freely chosen public life. Communism, according to Marx, is a non-alienated form of life due to its public ownership of the means of production; in communism a full development of human nature is no longer an indirect and incidental effect, but an end in itself. The meaning of public life is only to achieve self-fulfillment of the individual in its entirety. It requires elimination of the sale of labor and private ownership of the means of production, which is possible at a certain stage of development of the capitalist mode of production. Socialization of the means of production leads to multiplication of satisfaction from labor; labor becomes the first necessity of life and man returns to his true nature. The totalitarian orientation of Rousseau’s concept of democracy and his criticism of liberalism has been further developed in Marxism and, especially, in Lenin’s and Stalin’s theory of democracy, as well as was realized in practice in the models of “socialist democracy” that persist to this day in communist countries. Works Cited Marx, Karl. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Web. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ Rousseau, Jean Jacques. A Dissertation On the Origin and Foundation of The Inequality of Mankind and is it Authorised by Natural Law? Web. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/rousseau/inequality/ch01.htm Read More