Mill & Marx on Human Freedom One of the most visible currents in the history

Two particularly visible thinkers that came to some conclusions regarding the problems of human freedom were John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Mill, one of the typical nineteenth century liberals, owed much of his initial thoughts on the subject of freedom to the works of Alexis de Tocqueville. Karl Marx, on the other hand, matured using the Hegelian dialectical traditions of conflict and argument, and was less of an idealist and more of a positivist than Mill. This paper will use Mill's On Liberty and Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to assess the question of freedom in a modern society. It will begin with an overview of Mill's basic ideas concerning freedom and liberty, and will then turn to the Marxian premise of alienation, with specific reference to alienated labor. The two authors will then be compared and contrasted, and the paper will finally conclude with the way that each of the two thinkers have been applied on the subject of human freedom.

As a political philosopher, Mill warns the reader against accepting dead or outmoded theoretical positions on the nature of human free

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group) is removed from: 1) the result of his activity, 2) the nature of his life, 3) other humans, 4) and individual human possibilities (pp. 726). However, the estrangement or alienation of the worker (re: individual) is not always external: . . . the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production  within the producing activity itself . . . as a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal function. . . and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal (p. 74). This idea of human individuality is also present in Mill, and he argues at length for the importance of the individual which comes from the continued process of selfdevelopment, and, in modern terms, selfactualization: . . . such being the reasons which make it imperative that human beings should be free to form opinion and to express their opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual, and through that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is either conceded or asserted in spite of prohibition. . . (p. 119). Thus, the only way th
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Approximate Word count = 1527
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)