Liberty: the conflicting views of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx - Essay Example

Mill is a proponent of democracy, which he sees as the best expression of the utilitarian ideal of liberty and the individual’s right to self determine his or her own activity according to the way that the self defines need. He writes in his treatise ‘On Liberty’ (1859), “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively… in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.” (Wilson, 2007) This establishes freedom of as the ultimate natural principle, situating Mill in the enlightenment tradition with Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, and others in positing the natural state of freedom as an ideal in opposition to the State, mediated by the social contract.

Marx criticizes this view’s refusal to accept economic egalitarianism and social justice related to the material needs of the individual, and posits a social contract based on communism as the ideal. In his polemic ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1843), Karl Marx writes: "Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others. It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. The right of property, is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society.

It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty." (GMU, 2011) In this sense, it can be seen that Mill and Marx agree almost identically about the definition of liberty as the natural state of being related to the absence of coercion from others in society, including other individuals, groups, or the State itself. However, where the two differ is in the question of individualism vs. communitarianism. Individualism can be seen as the foundation of utilitarianism as posited by Mill, because it promoted the individual to sovereign and based the rights of community existence upon their exercise through individual moral actions, activities, and choices.

Marx used a communitarian moral basis for communism, with the rejection of the isolated form of individualism as symptomatic of the problems relating to social justice and the economic rights of man. In Marx’s view, the economic rights were determinant, for without an egalitarian social economy as a basis of society, individuals could not express their choices of freedom equally – with the rich enjoying all luxury and the poor lacking basic education, medicines, and opportunity. Where Mill’s utilitarianism advocates a laissez faire State economic policy as an ideal, and uses this as an example of social freedom, Marx disputes it with his critique of industrial capitalism showing the moral depravity of the individual in social environments that lack a communitarian basis in favor of isolated individualism.

This can be seen clearly in the evolved tone of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) where he writes: “But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and