Marx's Dream: From Capitalism to Communism

Marx’s Dream

Marx’s Dream

From Capitalism to Communism

Tom Rockmore

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55452-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55466-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226554662.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rockmore, Tom, 1942– author.

Title: Marx’s dream : from capitalism to communism / Tom Rockmore.

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038032 | ISBN 9780226554525 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226554662 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. | Philosophy, Modern—19th century.

Classification: LCC B3305.M74 R573 2018 | DDC 335.4092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038032

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The unity of theory and practice exists not only in theory but also for practice.

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE  On Marx’s Theory of Practice

On Culture and Civilization

Plato’s Republic and Human Flourishing

Rousseau’s Problem

On Property, Private Property, and Human Flourishing

Hegel, Recognition, and the Modern State

Hegel on Human Flourishing in the Modern State

Hegel and Economic Flourishing

Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Marx on Theory, Practice, and Changing the World

On the Marxian Subject

Feuerbach, Fichte, and the Marxian Subject

On the Marxian Alternative to Modern Political Economy

Marxian Political Economy as Economic Constructivism

Marx on Human Flourishing and Communism

Human Flourishing as Social Freedom

PART TWO  Marx and Marxism on Materialism, Feuerbach, and Hegel

What Is Materialism?

Materialism in Marx’s Early Writings

Engels’s (Marxist) View of Feuerbach

Materialism, Idealism, and The German Ideology

Marx’s (Non-Marxist) View of Feuerbach

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach

Vico, Materialism, and Constructivism in Capital

Materialism, Dialectic, and the Second Afterword to Capital

Excursus on the Reflection Theory of Knowledge

On Hegel’s Dialectical Theory of Cognition

Marx on Hegelian Dialectic

PART THREE  On the Practice of Marx’s Theory, or the Transition from Capitalism to Communism

1. Transition through the Revolutionary Proletariat

2. Transition through Economic Crisis

Normal and Abnormal Economic Crises

Introduction to Marx on Crisis in Theories of Surplus Value

Marx Attacks Ricardo’s View of Profit

The Mature Marxian View of Economic Crisis

Financial Crisis and the Marxian Model of Economic Crisis

Economic Crisis and Value Theory

Limitations to the Falling Rate of Profit

Croce, Okishio, Piketty, and the Falling Rate of Profit

Critical Remarks on the Marxian Model of the Final Economic Crisis

An Excursus on Marx and Financial Crisis

3. Transition through Politics

On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

On the Practice of Proletarian Dictatorship

On the Withering Away of the State

Lenin on the Party as the Revolutionary Vanguard

Lenin on Democracy

Dictatorship over the Proletariat

4. Transition through Critical Social Theory

Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory

Critical Theory, or Critical Social Theory

Excursus on Pollock and Critical Theory

Pollock, Habermas, and Critical Social Theory

Habermas on Historical Materialism

Conclusion: Marx’s Dream

Notes

Index

Introduction

Karl Marx was trained in classical German philosophy. Though he later became a political economist, in some respects he always remained a German idealist philosopher.¹ He is, by any measure, one of the most important thinkers of modern times. In the middle of the nineteenth century he dreamed a powerful dream of an alternative vision of modern industrial society. His effort to solve the ancient philosophical problem of human flourishing provides a position as well as the criterion to evaluate it in his famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world but the point is to change it. In rejecting the suggestion that philosophy as such is useful, he formulates a view that neither overlooks nor isolates theory from practice, nor substitutes practice for theory. The practical possibility of such a theory is not evident but must be examined.

One of the differences between this volume and the usual way to approach Marx is that this book attempts as much as possible to understand him through his own texts rather than seeking to understand him through Marxism. Marxism was mainly created by and still often follows Friedrich Engels. It was initially formulated in the 1880s, shortly after Marx’s passing, at a time when many of Marx’s central texts were not yet available. They include a number of his most important writings: "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [Elements of the Philosophy of Right]," the Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, Capital volumes 2 and 3, and the Theories of Surplus Value. There are clearly political reasons for understanding Marx through Marxism in continuing to maintain the fiction that Marx and Engels hold the same view but that, as is sometimes said, Engels explains it better. Yet there are clearly philosophical reasons to understand Marx through his own writings. Since Marxism was formulated before the majority of these texts were available, there is an obvious tendency to insist on various forms of the Marxist view of Marx that has historically often been defended against the view Marx works out in writings that in many cases only later became available. In parting with this tendency, this study will base its account of Marx’s position on what he in fact says as distinguished from what is often said in his name. For the present aim is not other than incidentally to find out what is living and dead in Marxism but rather to find what is living and dead in Marx.

This study breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in four main ways. First, it depicts the concern with the relation of theory to practice as arising in the tradition as early as Socrates and as constitutive of philosophy in its best moments. Second, it seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. Third, it relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, hence without special pleading of any kind. Fourth, it seeks to read Marx in his own context as well as from the present perspective in order to present, as far as possible, a wide-ranging, informed view of Marx for our times.

The need to read Marx not only in his own historical moment but in ours as well is obvious. This is a historical moment in which Marx’s contribution lies less in his possible contribution to bringing about revolution however understood than in helping us to understand the contemporary world. Since Marx stresses practice, and since the world has changed, we should no longer read Marx in the way that, say, he was understood by Vladimir Lenin shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. It is more useful to read Marx against the background of current problems and possible solutions. Hence one aim of this volume is to suggest a different way to grasp Marx at a time when, unlike the 1920s, it no longer seems as if the entire world, or at least Europe, is teetering on the verge of revolution.

Though I will often be critical of Marx, let me say that I regard his criticisms of capitalism in the middle of the nineteenth century as correctly identifying deep, persistent problems of modern industrial society that for the most part are unfortunately still with us. The difficulty lies less in the diagnosis, which mainly appears sound, than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound.

Marx, who died in 1883, is a rare original thinker. This study is largely concerned with piecing together, interpreting, and evaluating Marx’s overall position, which he never presents in any single text. Marx’s view is more than usually difficult to interpret. He is not always a precise or clear writer. Further, few of his texts, with the obvious exception of the first volume of Capital, were intended for publication or even finished. His extensive bibliography is composed of often very interesting, important, but incomplete fragments that, taken together, represent Marx’s gigantic effort in a huge corpus over many years to work out his position.

Marx is often, indeed routinely, conflated with those who claim to speak in his name. Statements by influential Marxists are often taken as an authoritative description of Marx’s position. In places where Marxism is historically strong, such as the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China, Marx has often been and in the latter is still often studied through textbooks prepared by Marxists rather than through his own writings. This practice amounts to reducing Marx’s position to a form of ideology. His success or failure in addressing the problem or problems for which his theory was formulated is less often studied.²

Classical Marxism depicts Marx, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, as leaving philosophy behind in order to solve the problems of classical German philosophy. This Marxist-inspired Feuerbachian approach to interpreting Marx is developed in different ways in the debate. These include the claim that Marx was concerned to leave philosophy, the idea that there is a so-called epistemological break between the early philosophical position and the later supposedly extraphilosophical scientific or at least more scientific position, the view that Marx seeks to overcome problems that German idealism is incapable of overcoming, and so on.

Yet it is false that he followed Feuerbach (or indeed anyone else) in leaving Hegel, or philosophy, behind. Marx is often depicted as leaving philosophy behind for science. According to Engels, Marx, in departing from philosophy, discovered the law of the development of human history. I will be describing Marx’s position, on the contrary, as a continuous series of developments initially arising out of his philosophical critique of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right and eventually leading without breaks of any kind to his alternative model, including his rival economic theory of modern industrial society.

Marx follows Socrates and many later thinkers in seeking to apply philosophical insights to the world in which we live. From ancient Greece to the present, selected thinkers have sought to bring philosophy to bear on a range of social problems. Socrates famously claims that the unexamined life is not worth living. In the seventh letter, Plato says that the true philosophy . . . enables us to discern what is just for a city or an individual in every case and that the human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really and truly philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in cities become real philosophers.³ Others have been content merely to practice philosophy, secure, like Immanuel Kant, in the belief that it is in all its forms intrinsically useful.

I will be arguing that Marx does not break with but rather builds on his philosophical background in formulating his own distinctive position, initially through his dialogue with G. W. F. Hegel. This updated version of the struggle between the gods and giants (gigantomachia peri tes ousias), or quarrel about reality, takes different forms running throughout his entire position.⁴ Marx does not turn his back on philosophy but rather strives to provide a distinctive new response to the ancient problem of human flourishing. This traditional philosophical theme arises in the early Greek tradition and assumes a distinctive new form in the modern tradition beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The present work is, like Gaul, divided into three parts. The first section depicts Marx’s philosophy as a theory of human flourishing. It situates Marx within the broader ethical tradition from Plato onward, with special attention to Hegel but also to Johann Gottlieb Fichte and others.

The first section seeks to free Marx from his self-appointed Marxist followers to understand him through his own writings. It is well said that Marxism is a series of misunderstandings about Marx.⁵ Marxism makes the implausible, politically motivated suggestion that Marx’s view arose as a single position jointly invented and jointly held by Marx and Engels. In this way it directs attention away from important differences in philosophical temperament, training, and capacity. These differences emerge from crucial philosophical disagreements between them. Marx, who earned a doctorate in philosophy according to the standards of the day, was a product of classical German philosophy. Engels, who did not finish high school, was a philosophical autodidact. His views are often closer to positivism than to Marx’s own views.

Marx and Engels were closely associated over many years. They agree politically but disagree philosophically. Marxism claims their views are identical in attributing different roles to each of them. Marxism often depicts Engels as a philosopher and Marx as a political economist. It would be closer to the mark to say that Marx was a philosopher as well as a political economist, but Engels, who had many interests, was neither one. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels invented an influential but largely imaginary tale of how Feuerbach enabled Marx to escape from philosophy to science, from idealism to materialism, and, by implication, from ideology to truth.

The second section discusses aspects of Marx’s relation to Hegel in some detail in developing the non-Marxist interpretation of Marx presented here. It depicts Marx as a philosopher either within or at least close to the German idealist tradition. It argues that the Marxist account of Feuerbach as the key to Marx’s transition from idealism to materialism is false. It further argues that the traditional Marxist account of Marx as a materialist arises mainly through a series of misunderstandings invented by Engels and should be rejected.

Marx’s effort to understand the relation of theory to practice is not intended as an end in itself but rather as a means to transcend modern industrial society through the transition to a postmodern form of society often called communism (and less often socialism). The third section considers four main accounts of the transition from capitalism to communism, including the action of the revolutionary proletariat hand in hand with the philosophers, as following from an unmanageable economic crisis, as orchestrated by an organized revolutionary communist party, and finally as brought about by critical social theory.

Marx’s overriding concern is not to overcome Hegel and even less to overcome Feuerbach. It is rather to solve (or resolve) the modern version of the theme of human flourishing, roughly free and full development as a human individual in the social context. This theme takes different forms at different times. After Rousseau the ancient philosophical concern with happiness or virtue is transformed through the Industrial Revolution into the problem of freedom in modern industrial society.

Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others discuss this theme in different ways, though not under that name. According to Marx, human flourishing is not and cannot be realized in the modern industrial world. It can only be reached in the postcapitalist or communist phase for which capitalism is a necessary presupposition.

Marx’s answer to this theme arises through his dialogue with Hegel and others. Marx’s early text "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law [Elements of the Philosophy of Right]" (1843)⁶ shapes his critique of Hegel, German idealism, and philosophy in general as well as his own alternative view. His productive misreading of Hegel’s view of the conditions and nature of human flourishing leads to his rival theory of this theme.

In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right Hegel answers Rousseau through a multilevel account of human flourishing within the confines of the modern world. Marx’s sharp critique of Hegel’s account of modern society that begins at the beginning of his intellectual career runs throughout his writings until the end of his life. In a sense, all of his later writings are successive steps in his effort to go further than Hegel in formulating a multidimensional view of human flourishing in the context of modern industrial society.

Marx’s position takes shape as his response to the complex question of the transition from capitalism, the central element in modern industrial society, to communism, also known as socialism. The suggestion that theory must not only interpret but also change the world points toward the unclear, never realized, in all probability unrealizable transition from capitalism to communism as Marx understands it. Marx’s view is heroic, insightful, and in many ways still useful. Yet when judged by his own standard as a theory that not merely interprets but also realizes itself, his position fails. In other words, it fails as a theory that appears likely or even possibly capable of realizing itself in practice as he understands it.

It will be useful to say a word about the edition of Marx’s writings I will rely on here. Except for rare instances, I will be citing the Collected Works of Marx and Engels (CW) published in fifty volumes by Lawrence and Wishart in London, also known as the MECW, or Marx-Engels Collected Works. This edition is currently the most complete edition of the collected works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels translated into English. As such it is preferable to the MEGA (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe), which, when it is finished, will be the definitive edition and when it is translated into English will displace the CW, but which is currently still a work in progress. I do not deny that there are better partial editions. The scholar may wish to verify particular texts in the MEGA edition. Yet, like the MECW, this study is not intended solely for the scholar, though it does not intentionally slight scholarship, but is rather intended for educated people everywhere. At present this aim seems best served by a more widely available, though less scholarly edition.

PART ONE

On Marx’s Theory of Practice

Philosophical views, like theories of all kinds, are formulated to respond to problems, enigmas, and puzzles of the most varied kinds. Marx’s main concern is a modern variation on the traditional ethical theme of human flourishing. This theme, which overlaps with such related conceptions as nature and nurture, happiness, self-actualization, human development, and other near synonyms, is as old as the Western philosophical tradition. It is, though not under that heading, anticipated by Socrates, stated by Plato, restated by Aristotle, and reformulated in modern times by Rousseau as what I will be calling Rousseau’s problem.

Rousseau asks the crucial question, In what social conditions, or in what kind of society, do human beings flourish and, if there is a difference, in what conditions do they flourish best? This theme emerges in the ancient tradition and runs throughout the modern tradition. It clearly engages Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Yet at present, after John Rawls, it is possible we are in the midst of a turn away from a concern with human flourishing and toward the more limited and perhaps less interesting question of what is just, not, as Plato asked, in the state writ large, but rather for the modern individual.¹

Marx and Hegel react to Rousseau’s problem, and more generally to the modern world, in sharply opposing ways. In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and other texts, Hegel studies freedom within modern industrial society. This is a theme he does not discover but analyzes in depth and embraces. He thinks finite human beings recognize themselves within the modern world. Marx rejects Hegel’s view of capitalism as even potentially an acceptable solution. He focuses on liberating individuals from the consequences of modern industrial capitalism, hence from the modern world, as a condition of flourishing in communism or a future social phase lying beyond capitalism.

Hegel was consistently interested in property throughout his career, starting with his early theological writings, then again in the early Jena lectures, before culminating in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. He approaches the modern state through a quasi-Fichtean conception of the finite human subject as basically active from the related perspectives of property, morality, and ethics. Hegel’s ethical theory builds on a number of predecessors, including Rousseau. Hegel regards Rousseau as the first thinker to recognize that free will is central to political philosophy.

Hegel shares Rousseau’s view of the unity of morality or, perhaps better, ethics and desire when the subjective desire is objectively right. Yet he rejects the idea of the noble savage who acts on immediate desires. Hence he turns away from the idea of the isolated individual subject in favor of a plural conception of the subject² as well as from the social contractarian position to which the concept of the noble savage leads.

Hegel believes that it is only in spirit that one is free. He thinks that human freedom is a product of human history, which is finally and best attained in the modern state. We know that Marx was already reading Hegel as a teenager. The beginning of his lifelong dialogue with Hegel is his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s [Elements of the] Philosophy of Right (1843), the essay that later led to his mature position; Marx initially encounters the problem of human freedom in modern industrial society in criticizing Hegel in the initial installment of a dialogue between these two conceptual giants that runs in different ways throughout all Marx’s later writings. Except for the introduction, this text was not published during Marx’s lifetime. The whole text, which only finally appeared in 1927, was not available as Marxism was taking shape.³

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel analyzes the problem of recognition in the context of an analysis of the relationship of master (Knecht) and slave (Diener). The Elements of the Philosophy of Right studies human freedom in the modern world, culminating in an account of recognition in the institutions of the modern state. Property is crucial to Hegel’s idea of modern self-recognition as well as to capitalism. According to Hegel, "A person, in distinguishing himself from himself, relates himself to another person, and indeed it is only as owners of property that the two have existence for each other."⁴ Marx denies the Hegelian view that we recognize ourselves in modern society, particularly through property.

It would be incorrect to claim that Marx calls attention to private property, which Hegel somehow overlooks. Yet their views clearly differ on this topic. According to Hegel, property is a basic form of social possession that gives a person status protected by contract and against crime with respect to others. Marx believes that private ownership of the means of production does not enable but rather prevents human self-recognition, hence human flourishing in modern society.⁵ Hegel thinks individuals can and do flourish within the institutions of the modern world. According to Marx, an indispensable condition of human flourishing is to leave capitalism behind in making the transition to communism. Marx, for whom Hegel misunderstands the modern world, holds that we must change the world to bring about human flourishing.

The Marxian intention to change the world is a qualified restatement of the Aristotelian theory of the sublunar world in which we live. Marx’s position includes theories of the subject, modern industrial society, communism as opposed to capitalism, and human flourishing as real social freedom possible only under communism. These four views function as pillars of Marx’s solution to Rousseau’s problem of the real conditions of human freedom in the modern world. The Marxian conception of the subject arises in rejecting the Hegelian conception of the subject as the absolute, as well as the economic conception of what is often described as homo economicus, in favor of a modified form of the Fichtean view. Marx identifies capitalism and communism through the institution of private property. One of the great surprises is that Marx, who spent a life of enormous intellectual toil struggling to bring about the flourishing of human beings, and who wrote voluminously, said very little about how he understood this goal. He seems never to have identified a final view of human freedom. His solution to the theme of human flourishing in communism is perhaps best characterized through the shortening of the working day. I come back to this point below.

On Culture and Civilization

Human flourishing is studied in a bewildering series of domains including religion, medicine, sociology, philosophy, and so on. It includes such conceptions as happiness (eudaimonia), independence or self-sufficiency (autarkeia), virtue or excellence of function, health, welfare, full development, and so on. According to Christianity human flourishing depends on reversing the fall. Augustine describes this approach, which for Christians of all stripes has always centered on a relation of finite human being to an infinite God, as returning from Athens to Jerusalem.⁶ Another approach is to understand culture and civilization as human constructions, in short as a series of indirect relations to themselves.

Human beings emerge within nature in constructing culture as well as, if there is a difference, civilization. It has been widely believed since Greek antiquity that human beings are social animals who naturally live in groups of various kinds, including the Greek polis and later cities and modern states. The city in all its many forms has a special role for human beings as a site for living, living better, and living well. In different ways the relation of humanly constructed surroundings to human flourishing, roughly what Aristotle called happiness (eudaimonia) as the consequence of excellence of function, has been on the agenda over a very long period. Plato’s Republic is an early effort to respond to this problem through a rationally designed city-state at a point in time when city and state had not yet been separated. The vocabulary and in part the problem changes in the modern tradition, where the ancient concern with happiness⁷ gives way to emphasis on freedom. In modern times human flourishing is understood as variously referring to self-determination or human development⁸ by Adam Smith,⁹ Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and many others.

Plato’s Republic and Human Flourishing

The relation of nature and culture attracted interest in early Greek philosophy. In the Republic, Socrates is challenged to demonstrate that justice is better than injustice. He responds by describing a just city that, since no one is self-sufficient, relies on cooperation for meeting human needs.¹⁰ The Platonic conception of the city-state echoes through the later debate, where it is understood in different ways. What for Hegel is only an empty ideal¹¹ is for Martin Heidegger the very model for the Nazi state¹² from the totalitarian perspective K. R. Popper rejects.¹³

In different ways, the theory of the rational state links politics, aesthetics, and epistemology. According to Plato, those engaged in cultural pursuits, including artists, sculptors, and poets, should be banned from the polis. For they do not and cannot know what they depict. This view supposes a mimetic conception of art that was the norm in ancient Greece. Nonphilosophical art must be excluded from the just polis that is based on philosophical insights. Plato contrasts philosophers, who alone have access to reality, hence know, to artists, sculptors, painters, and others of all kinds who do not and cannot know. He depicts philosophers as the true artists, who construct a republic that, as a work of art in his sense, is simultaneously true, good, and useful.

The Platonic account of human flourishing is based on a conception of human being. The main insight is the conception of function (ergon) that, if properly exercised, constitutes human well-being. The basic argument emerges in the course of thinking about living better in a just state late in Republic, book 1. Socrates asks, in calling attention to a conception of human being underlying the theme of living better in the just state: Do you think there is such a thing as the function of a horse?¹⁴ This leads to an important argument linking function and virtue. A function is what someone or something alone can do or does better than anything else, and a virtue is excellence of function. Socrates illustrates this doctrine in pointing out that a horse has a function, or what one can do with it. In the same way, the function of the eye is to see and of the ear it is to hear. Socrates goes on to suggest that, if the soul is just, a person will live well.

The key insight is that a human being has a function best expressed in a particular kind of social context. Plato links his conception of human function to the organization of the city-state, or the individual writ large. The Platonic republic is conceived as a living work of art, in which, through division of labor corresponding to intrinsic capacity, each person is subordinated to the whole in exerting a function that that person is most capable or even only capable of performing.

Plato draws attention to a link between human capacity and human function that echoes through the later debate. He believes that living well—what Aristotle later thinks of as human happiness (eudaimonia),¹⁵ which is also sometimes translated as human function¹⁶—depends on excellence of human function in a social context, in short, in doing the job well for which one is assigned by nature as it were. This view echoes through the later tradition. In modern times, it returns as the idea of the division of labor in two ways. On the one hand, there is one’s specific capacity to be happy in a social context. Thus Aristotle describes human flourishing as an activity, or the exercise of virtue, also called excellence (arête), according to reason, a characteristic he understands as unique to human beings. On the other hand, there is the maximization of profit within the process of production condemned by Smith, Marx, and many others. Smith points out that, as Marx later emphasizes, especially in his account of alienation in the Paris Manuscripts, the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be. . . . But in every improved and civilized society this is the state in which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.¹⁷

Rousseau’s Problem

The problem of human flourishing takes different forms at different times. Plato bases his solution to the problem of human flourishing in the ideal city-state on his view that human beings have a fixed nature, hence a fixed social function. In modern times, Rousseau and others call this Platonic assumption into question. This assumption is understood from many different perspectives. In his influential version of human flourishing,¹⁸ Rousseau examines the Platonic assumption of a fixed link between human being and the social surroundings. In this way he transforms the theme of human flourishing, which the Greeks approach through happiness, into the problem of freedom in the modern social context.

In the seventeenth century, in Leviathan Thomas Hobbes is concerned with the problem of defending the mere possibility of life that, as he famously observes, is nasty, brutish and short¹⁹ through a social contract. When around a century later in the eighteenth century, Rousseau equally famously observes that man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,²⁰ his objective in entering into a social contract is not merely life itself. It is rather a meaningful form of freedom in the social context as the central modern place of human flourishing.

The challenge Rousseau posed in the middle of the eighteenth century was interpreted in vastly different ways. Kant was deeply interested in Rousseau. He depicts the latter’s problem from a recognizably Aristotelian perspective in terms of the relation of morality and happiness. According to Kant, Rousseau, "in his Emile, in his Social Contract, and other works . . . seeks to answer this more difficult question: how must culture progress so as to develop the capacities that belong to mankind’s vocation as a moral species and a natural species? From this conflict . . . arise all true evil that oppresses human life and all vice that dishonors it."²¹ In his Handschriftlicher Nachlass, he repeats his acceptance of Rousseau’s thesis in adding a kind of early ecological point about the proper relation to nature. According to Kant, humanity must strive for the unity of happiness and morality that reaches its high point not in dominating nature but rather in enabling it to flourish.²² Other observers, including Hegel and Marx, treat Rousseau’s challenge as a problem of civilization.

There are in general three main modern solutions to the problem of human flourishing. These include, first, returning beyond the socially constructed context to an earlier, more primitive but clearly imaginary state of development, sometimes called the state of nature. Some observers think the state of nature is comparatively more advanced than alternative approaches to human well-being. Second, there is the concern to seek the human good not outside of but within the modern social context in all its many forms. Third, there is the view that it is only in transcending the modern social context, hence in leaving the modern world behind, that human beings will finally be able to become fully human. These three approaches can be illustrated through remarks concerning Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx.

At the time he wrote the Discourse, Rousseau already held the anti-Christian view, strongly resisted by Roman Catholicism, that human beings are naturally good. We can leave to one side the problem of whether his view basically changed between the Discourse (1755) and the Social Contract (1762). In the latter work he raises the question that, as Shlomo Avineri notes, he was unable to answer, about the gap between history and the good life.²³ In other words, how can we construct an authentic and true society in view of the evils and corruption of conventional society?

Everyone knows that, according to Rousseau, human beings, who are naturally good in the state of nature, are supposedly later corrupted by civilization. There is a close relation between the state of nature and human nature. Georg Lukács usefully notes that nature is understood in different ways. He points to differences among conceptions of nature as a mechanical model, beginning with Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, which is later restated by Kant; as a value concept; and finally as a series of human capacities supposedly thwarted in various social stages such as capitalism. The latter is discussed by J. C. F. von Schiller, the German poet, then by Hegel, and then in enormous detail by Marx, and is at least implied much earlier in Rousseau’s conviction that modern social . . . institutions strip man of his human essence.²⁴

Rousseau is either uninterested in, or unable to grasp, the origin of this state of affairs in which in modern society human beings have lost their supposed original freedom. He seems to understand political legitimacy as deriving from a so-called common liberty that belongs to human nature in the natural state. He takes as his political model, as Hegel later does, the family in which, since everyone is born free and equal, and individuals justly alienate their freedom for utility.

Rousseau bases his fictitious idea of liberty prior to and apart from the modern state in the equally fictitious state of nature that holds sway prior to government. This fiction was widely popular when he was active. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others think it is rational to leave the so-called state of nature to overcome deficiencies for which government is the appropriate remedy.

The general conception of the state of nature goes back to Thomas Aquinas and perhaps even to Aristotle. Modern social contract theorists characterize it in different ways. According to Hobbes, it is a realm in which the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice . . . have no place.²⁵ But according