Spence 1 Clay Spence Prof.

Paul Hurley PPE Philosophy 2/1/2014 Human Emancipation and the Rights of Man in On the Jewish Question Marxs critique of the Rights of Man takes as its root a particular genealogy of national government, namely the emergence of liberal societies from the feudal Middle Ages. I find Marxs historical account, which seems to jump instantaneously from the medieval period to the spread of democracy, somewhat dubious, but as it is intrinsic to Marxs argument I will take it as given. For Marx the old civil society had a directly political character, which is to say that the relation of the individual to the state under the feudal system was structured by a lord/servant paradigm such that the political power to govern inhered in a single ruler or ruling elite (Marx, 44-45). When political revolution against the old feudalist society took place, it abolished the political character of civil society, and thereby set free the political spirit which had, so to speak, been dissolved, fragmented, and lost in the various culs-de-sac of feudal society (Marx, 45). In emancipating individuals from the bondage of feudalism, political revolution made possible a true human emancipation of the political spirit from its connection with civil life, such that man might redefine his nature as a communal creature, oriented primarily towards fellow citizens, and ethically concerned for the well-being of his fellow man (Marx, 45). Marxs vision of an ideal human political society seems strongly to forerun what would eventually be labelled the communitarian school of thought in calling for the genuine and harmonious species-life of man (Marx, 36). For Marx, human emancipation will only be

Spence 2 complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen has become a species-beingso that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power (Marx, 46). On this reading, Marxs ideal requires man-as-species-being to identify primarily as citizen, in accord with his nature as a social animal. Yet while Marx doesnt contextualize his vision of perfect civic participation in his liberal ethic of respecting mans freedom in On the Jewish Question, it suffices here to note that, for Marx, the political revolution against feudalism failed to bring about the Marxist ideal of total identification with the state. At that critical juncture in history following the revolution against the feudal political hierarchy, capitalist forces undercut the emancipatory thrust of the revolutionary movement and fractured civil society from politics. In the aftermath of the formation of modern liberal societies, The bonds which had restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society were removed along with the political yoke. Political emancipation was at the same time an emancipation of civil society from politicsFeudal society was dissolved into its basic element, man; but into egoistic man who was its real foundation. (Marx, 45) What went wrong? Although in restoring sovereignty to individual persons the political revolution dissolved civil society into its constituent elements, it did so without revolutionizing these elements themselves or subjecting them to criticism (Marx, 46). Crucial here is Marxs understanding of human nature as a fluid construct, subject to change and determined by material forces. In the formation of modern liberal states like our own, human persons driven by the urge to produce and acquire capital retreated into sensuous, individual, and immediate existence, preserving Marxs species-being, the civically-minded political man only allegorically -- as an abstract category to be resurrected, perhaps, on voting day (Marx, 46). Mans nature, following

Spence 3 the political revolution against feudal government, molded itself to the contours of the selfinterested, atomic individual paradigm in response to capitalistic pressures. Most representative of this shift in human nature for Marx were the American and French Revolutions, with their formal declarations of the Rights of Man. Consisting of equality, liberty, security [and] property (according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), with derivative rights like religious freedom and property rights attendant to the right to liberty, Marxs Rights of Man are the core entitlements constitutive of modern liberal democracies like our own (Marx, 42). Marx, with his rhetoric of emancipation, seems to operate within a pseudo-liberal model of expanding human freedom. Yet although the Rights of Man as codified in the constitutions of liberal democracies seem superficially to lengthen the list of mans freedoms (e.g. following the Declaration of the Rights of Man, man is free to practice the religion of his choice), Marx argues vehemently that the political emancipation embodied in these founding texts is a ruse. On Marxs view, none of the supposed rights of mango beyond the egoistic man, man as he isan individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice (Marx, 42-43). Ergo, for Marx, the right to liberty is the right of separation of man from man, the right of the circumscribed individual (Marx, 42), and the right to security is merely an assurance of mans liberty to act egoistically. In modern liberal states where man, at best, leads a double-existence as a communal being in civil society and a private individual willing to exploit fellow men for profit, the final ideal of human emancipation is far removed (Marx, 34). For Marx, the function of declarations

Spence 4 of the Rights of Man is to decree that birth, social rank, education [and] occupation are nonpolitical distinctions, but more fundamentally is to reify and entrench these extant social divisions in a manner that allows the systems of oppression and economic enslavement represented by legacies of race and class discrimination to manifest their particular nature (Marx, 33). In particular, the liberal human-rights scheme empowers Westboro Baptist Churchstyle hate speech (free speech rights), Walmart-style commercial exploitation of human beings living at the poverty line (property rights), and Sandy Hook-style killing sprees (right to bear arms), for instance. For far from abolishing the effective differences amongst persons of which these examples are indicative, the liberal state only exists so far as they are presupposed, and fails to grasp that a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man (Marx, 33). In Marxs narrative, the Rights of the Citizen which secure, for instance, political suffrage and mans right to discourse freely on issues of public concern, are, in an alarming twist, subservient to the Rights of Man. Marx contends that political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these so-called rights of man, with the consequence that the citizen is declared to be the servant of egoistic man such that it is man as bourgeois and not man as a citizen who is considered the true and authentic man (Marx, 43). The challenge Marxs argument poses for the modern liberal state is then twofold. In the first place, Marxs understanding of the Rights of the Citizen as subservient to the Rights of Man makes clear that, in practice, the liberalism definitive of modern states like our own paradoxically operates in opposition to the liberal ideal of authentic self-government by divorcing mans interests from the good of the collective. Yet perhaps more strikingly, Marxs account of the transition from feudalism to the modern era exposes a glaring theoretical

Spence 5 deficiency in the liberal philosophy from which the Rights of Man derive. The traditional Western understanding of persons as atomic, self-interested entities who emerge from a state of nature to contract with each other to form a state is, on Marxs view, a fundamentally flawed account of both the origin of the modern liberal state, and human nature. Whither from Marxs dire prognosis? On the Jewish Question leaves substantial room for guesswork, but Marx hints that the tendency of liberal societies like our own to alienate the individual human being is symptomatic of a Christian worldview which precludes individual persons from fully and subjectively identifying with the political project of human emancipation in their capacity as species-beings. Marx writes, only under the sway of Christianity, which objectifies all national, natural, moral and theoretical relationships, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-bonds of man, establish egoism and selfish need in their place, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic, antagonistic individuals (Marx, 51). It seems to me, then, that Marx ideal requires not only a shift from political structures grounded in the Rights of Man, but also a subjective reinvestment on the part of the individual person in her moral and political commitments to fellow human beings. But as it usually is in ethics, the way forward from this very general recognition is less than clear.

Spence 6 Works Cited: Marx, Karl. On the Jewish Question. 1843. In The Marx-Engels Reader 2nd edition. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. W.W.Norton & Co. New York, NY. 1978. Print.