Rousseau and Marx: The Radical Critics

Throughout history, each political view, philosophy, or theology created has been reviewed and criticized during its time. The Classical Liberal Tradition emerging from Feudalism has created critics too. Two critics, Rousseau and Marx criticize the Classical Liberal Tradition’s central elements and form their own argument and alternative to others of their time like Hobbes and Locke.

The Classical Liberal Tradition key elements consist of rights and the rights of nature. For classical liberals like Hobbes and Locke, everyone has rights from nature and laws of nature. With these natural rights, we could then establish government based on consent of the people; thus the people forming a democratic system. In the state of nature, we are all free, and we are all equal. These rights apply to everyone and unalienable. The Classical Liberal Tradition is freedom for all by nature, for everyone.

With a movement as such, there exists philosophers and like-minded thinkings of their time who were also Classical Liberals, but much more radical, disputing their influentialists and the like. Rousseau disagreed with key elements of the Classical Liberal Tradition. In The Social Contract, Rousseau pokes fun at other philosophies about the force, slavery, and other points from other popular philosophers at the time. Rousseau’s human nature depicts a different story. Rousseau states that we [human beings] are social creatures. Human beings are intersocial and interdependent. Since human beings depend on each other, human beings must be equal, and there cannot be slaves. Rousseau states, “Thus, in whatever light we view things, the right of slavery is found null, not only because it is unjustifiable but because it is absurd and has no meaning. The ...

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...istic] bourgeoisie: in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society”. Meaning that the change into it’s new capitalist class to then become communism when, “Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”. That is social tension that will occur and has occurred to feudalism. Marx does not see the practicality of the philosophers he criticizes as they only see the past and move forward as Marx looks at history and sees the future of what will come.

The Classical Liberal Tradition has been criticized by not just its own peers, but their radical peers as well, who make their own solutions to their problem in the developing philosophy that emerges from Feudalism. There, Rousseau and Marx went to the central elements that the Classical Liberal Tradition were wrong with in their opinion and their alternative to the Liberal position.