Marx & Rousseau on Private Property

Karl Marx is correct when he argues that rights in civil society---specifically the right of property---add nothing essential to the accomplishment of radical human equality. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whatever his ideals, believed that the rights of the people should be severely limited in order to assure an orderly society---except for the right of property. Marx's argument is that rights---of property particularly---produce isolated, self-interested individuals who are nevertheless dependent upon one another, and profoundly unequal. In making such arguments, Marx seeks to arrive at a social ideal which would give true rights to people based on social consciousness rather than selfishness and inequality. On the other hand, while he is associated with the French Revolution and its efforts to restore rights, Rousseau was far more concerned with limiting those rights if they threatened to interfere with what he saw as an orderly society, and with securing and protecting the rights of the rich to maintain their property.. Marx accurately critiqued capitalistic society and sought correctly to devise a system in which human rather than property rights would restore the humanity to human beings, while Rousseau showed his true, elitist colors in devising an ideal society which treated human beings as stupid beings requiring control far more than rights, except for property rights for his fellow elites. An examination of the two writers' views on the right of property will illustrate th

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evelopment of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it. . . . Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labour create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. . . . By "individual" you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must . . . be swept out of the way. This is the same bourgeois who Rousseau wants to protect in his ideal society, primarily with respect to their right to own private property. Although Rousseau sets limits---however vague---on the amount of property which an individual can own, the right of property remains a basic element of his ideal society. This fact, in light of Marx's astute analysis of what the right of property means, exposes Rousseau as a man who did not want the universal equality for which the French Revolution allegedly stood: It should be remembered that the foundation of the social compact is property, together with its first condition that each person should be maintained in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him. However, as Marx points out, the individual owning property is hardly in a state of "enjoyment" with respect to that property. To the contrary, that individual is in a miserable s

Category: Economics - M