Enlightenment Theory & The Communist Manifesto

This research will examine the relationship between the theory articulated in The Communist Manifesto and earlier traditions of Western thought, particularly the Enlightenment. The research will set forth the context in which the philosophical connections are relevant to an understanding of Marxist thought and then discuss how Marx can be said to build upon the intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment and Western liberalism while at the same time rejecting much of the content of the inheritance, with a view toward identifying implications for Marx's belief that socialism was inevitable and necessary.

In the background of the emergence of The Communist Manifesto in 1848 was undoubtedly the intellectual and political foment surrounding the twin phenomena of rapid industrialization and urbanization on one hand and on the other the persistence of social and political rigidity that had been installed in Europe as a consequence of Napoleon's defeat in 1815 and the ascendance of Metternich's Concert System. Marx reaches even further back into European history to describe the present state of European society and political economy, and he is at some pains to establish a historical context for his explanation of widespread hostility to communism, the "spectre haunting Europe" (49). In other words, there is a basis in history for the situation of class confrontation that dominates the structure of European experience. Once that basis is explained, the rationale for revolution will

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ore progressively dominated "class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs" (Marx 74). This is the problem with reformist political ideas that yet retain commitment to "eternal truths" of religion and morality that communism seeks to abolish. Thus although The Communist Manifesto says that communism, will support "every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things" (91), the only valid mechanism of resolving these antagonisms is the communist-led "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" (91). Accordingly, Marx embraces rather than defends the fact that communism "acts in contradiction to all past historical experience" (74). He describes the communist revolution as "the most radical rupture with traditional relations . . . the most radical rupture with traditional ideas" (74), which have informed even the most progressive projects of political and social reform. The Communist Manifesto rejects feudal socialism, informed by Christian asceticism that rails against property but thereby sanctions aristocratic power vis-a-vis the majority of people (78-9); petty-bourgeois socialism and what Marx refers to as "True Socialism," which manifest as temporary

Category: Philosophy - E