The following is an essay I wrote for a class on Political Theory I took at Duke University in 2020.
Mills and Marx: Political and/or Human Emancipation
Karl Marx and John Stuart Mills are likely as diametrically different men as can be found in the realm of political thought, but both offer profound insights on the concepts of political liberties and human emancipation. In fact, their difference is beneficial, as contrasting these men’s views on the above concepts can be particularly illuminating. Marx believed that political emancipation is the granting of liberties to men, while human emancipation is the actualization of man’s potential. He makes this distinction to argue that political emancipation is insufficient for actual human actualization; political emancipation distances men from each other, while human emancipation can only be brought about when men come together. I argue that John Stuart Mills would disagree with this view; in ‘On Liberty’ And Other Writings, Mills argues that the full dissemination of rights and liberties (political emancipation) is the way in which human emancipation is best achieved. I will demonstrate this by examining what Marx means by ‘political emancipation’ and ‘human emancipation’, showing why he makes this distinction, and then addressing Mill’s opposing viewpoint.
Marx first addresses the idea of political emancipation in his text The Jewish Question; he uses his response to Bruno Bauer to introduce the concept of political emancipation. In The Jewish Question, Marx is specifically responding to Bauer’s assertions about the emancipation of the Jews, and formulates a different viewpoint that he uses as a jumping-off point to explore the idea of political emancipation. Marx discusses political emancipation in language common to this concept; he speaks of rights, liberties, and freedoms. In his response to Bauer, he describes political emancipation as consisting of a number of rights, as follows:
In part these rights are political rights that can be exercised only in community with others. Participation in the community, indeed the political community or state, constitutes their substance. They belong in the category of political freedom, of civil rights (Marx 15).
Marx claims that these are the rights of citizens, and relates political emancipation specifically to a political freedom from the constraints of an oppressive state. He states that “Political emancipation is also the dissolution of the old society on which rests the sovereign power, the character of the state as alienated from the people'' (Marx 18). This dissolution also entailed a divorce of men from politics: “Political emancipation was at the same time the emancipation of civil society from politics, from the appearance of a general content” (Marx 19). However, perhaps Marx’s most important insight into the character of political emancipation is the limitations it imposes on itself, and the effects of it upon the common man. For Marx, political emancipation and human emancipation are two distinct but inextricably intertwined topics. To discuss human emancipation, we must first examine how political emancipation is related to it by exploring how its limitations are insufficient, but also necessary, to achieving human emancipation.
Marx believed that political emancipation’s very purpose is its weakness; by providing liberties to men, it separates them and thus does not allow for the realization of each man’s, and thus society’s, true potential. He explicitly states this many times throughout the text, in statements like “Political emancipation is a reduction of man to a member of civil society, to an egoistic independent individual on the one hand and to a citizen, a moral person, on the other” (Marx 21). As stated above, political emancipation by its very nature divides: “The splitting of man into public and private...is not just a step in political emancipation but its completion” (Marx 10). The very rights given to men force them to withdraw into themselves, their private interests, their private choices; “they are separate from the community as a member of civil society” (Marx 17). To be clear, Marx still views political emancipation as important, but stresses that it is not the final step: “Political emancipation is indeed a great step forward. It is not, to be sure, the final form of universal human emancipation” (Marx 10). In fact, he believes that “political emancipation by itself is not human emancipation” (Marx 14).
In essence, Marx makes the distinction between political and human emancipation because he believes that political emancipation is not enough. This sentiment can be best described by Marx as follows:
Only when the actual, individual man has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and his individual relationships has become a species-being, only when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political power, only then is human emancipation complete (Marx 21).
Marx believes that human emancipation is the bringing together of men separated by political emancipation; “All emancipation is restoration of the human world and the relationships of men themselves” (Marx 20). His belief that true human emancipation lies in the strength of men’s relationships with one another is critical building block in his pitch for communism; communism at its very core is based upon the relation of men to each other, and thus Marx believes that “the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in its political form as the emancipation of workers, not as though it is only a question of the emancipation but because in their emancipation is contained universal human emancipation [emphasis added]” (Marx 67). Thus, “this communism as completed naturalism is humanism”; in essence, political emancipation and human emancipation are distinct concepts in that the former is insufficient to bring about the latter, and that the latter can be fulfilled through communism.
John Stuart Mills has a very different opinion on this subject, one that disagrees fundamentally with Marx’s core assertions: Mills believes that individual liberty and the separation of man is thus both his political and human emancipation. The individuality that Marx characterizes as so deadly is celebrated by Mills. Mills puts special emphasis on these rights as critical to protecting man from the tyranny of a majority, and elaborates on the three necessary forms of liberty in order to more fully achieve this goal. The first of these is dominion over one’s own thoughts, conscience, and opinions: “first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological” (Mills 15). The second of these is control over one’s own life: “the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like”, so long as this does not harm any others (Mills 15). The third and final of these is the “liberty of each individual...within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to other: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived” (Mills 15-16). Mills views these three major components of liberty as essential to protecting against the encroachment of what he sees as “an increasing inclination [in the world at large] to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation” (Mills 17). Mills views individual liberty, and the protection from societal pressures to conform, as the way in which man can most fully express himself, a concept Karl Marx would call human emancipation.
These two theories both agree on the importance of political rights, but fundamentally disagree on the importance of them; Marx views political emancipation as insufficient for human emancipation, and that the isolation and individuality wrought by political emancipation can only be rectified by strengthening relations with other men to achieve human emancipation, most ideally through communism. Mills however views political emancipation as the key to human emancipation, and that the individualization wrought by political emancipation is the best way to ensure the human emancipation of each individual man.