The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and first published in 1848 [1], predates writing of On Liberty by John Stuart Mill by more than a decade. Although both Mill and Marx were living in England at the time of On Liberty's publication in 1859,[2] the two authors moved in different circles. While Mill was a high-ranking employee of the East India Company,[3] Marx had emigrated to London in 1849 and lived in relative poverty despite his hard work and notoriety.[4] Thus, for Marx and Engels, Mill was more a contemporary than a comrade. Like the two authors whose paths overlap in space and time without really touching, the Manifesto and On Freedom address some of the same themes but interpret them in different ways. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why should violent video games not be banned”? Get an original essay Although the Communist Manifesto and On Freedom created massive paradigm shifts in the social sciences and have many many themes in common, they were written for different audiences to achieve different goals. The Manifesto is primarily a socio-economic treatise while On Liberty is more interested in civic structure and morality. Although politics, economics, and moral philosophy all seek to explain and possibly optimize the behavior of people in groups, they are not in the same domain. The two articles should therefore not be seen as opposed, except perhaps on the subject of Kantian moral theory. Both authors place a high value on personal freedom. They share an optimistic view of the ability of a free individual to judge what is best for his or her own interests, but they also recognize the power of "society" as a whole to act as a moral or legal authority . They both make optimistic predictions about how human beings in a state of freedom (i.e. not excessively oppressed) will choose to behave. Each author develops his hypotheses to describe an optimal state of affairs which would bring as much freedom as possible to the greatest number of people. Yet authors differ so profoundly in their definition of what freedom is and the states of affairs necessary for its existence, that the differences outweigh the similarities. Marx and Engels present freedom primarily in economic terms. But for Mill, freedom is more of a civil and legal phenomenon linked to the interactions between a state and the individuals who compose it. It is clear that Marx, Engels, and Mill all believe that personal freedom is valuable. In the Communist Manifesto, the value of being able to do what one wants is so evident that Marx and Engels speak of freedom primarily in negative terms. They describe the proletariat or working class as lacking economic freedom, explaining that they are "exploited" [5] by the bourgeois class. According to the Manifesto, bourgeois control of the means of economic production allows this class to control the price of labor, to the detriment of the working proletariat. Forced to compete for work and income opportunities, proletarian individuals are subjected to increasingly degrading and dehumanizing work experiences and are not free to choose more satisfying or profitable working or living conditions. This, according to Marx and Engels, is a bad thing. In On Liberty, Mill describes a struggle between individuals and government to "achieve a proper adjustment between the independenceindividual and social control” [6]. Instead of viewing this struggle as evil or heretical, and instead of condemning people for questioning or seeking to limit the authority of a government established by divine right, Mill presents the conflict between individuals and their government as natural and appropriate. He thus attributes to personal freedom the same moral value as to government. He also clearly states that “[i]t is desirable, in short, that in those things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. [7] In both articles, the authors take an optimistic view of a free individual's ability to think rationally and judge what is best for themselves. They are also optimistic about the behavior of human beings in a state of freedom. Marx and Engels do not question whether a working-class individual is capable of making intelligent decisions about where and how to live, or how to manage those parts of the means of production that are within his or her control. Once the bourgeoisie has been eliminated and the last vestiges of bourgeois culture and values ​​swept away, Marx and Engels assert that the proletariat will create a community in which “the free development of each person is the condition for the free development of each person.” [8] In other words, the community as a whole, and the individuals within it, would be so concerned with protecting the freedom of their peers that they would not consider themselves free or prosperous until no individual flourished freely towards him to the best of his abilities and desires. To this end, the Manifesto proposes free public schooling. The authors assume that people who have access to these educational options will choose to exercise them and that workers will happily and voluntarily continue to work even without economic pressure or incentive to do so. Like Marx and Engels, Mill is optimistic about universal education. Although it does not name the government as an appropriate education provider except for the poorest students, it recommends that it require parents to purchase the education they deem appropriate and affordable for their children. He offers no suggestions on how exactly such policies would be implemented or how public schools would be funded. Unlike Marx and Engels, Mill recognizes that some individuals will abuse their freedom. He does not claim that freedom will produce just and morally appropriate actions except in the long run. Although he characterizes most violations of social norms as "eccentricity," he admits that when an adult wallows in drunkenness, recklessness, and other destructive behavior, the people who rely on that adult are injured. But he does not recommend legal sanctions against the irresponsible. Instead, it relies on social “disapproval.” He proposes limiting the state's ability to punish an offender in proportion to that offender's impact on others. Exactly how this impact might be measured or reimbursed, particularly in the case of violent crime, Mill does not say. Yet, unlike the authors of the Manifesto, Mill at least recognizes that free individuals will not always behave with the welfare of others in mind. The authors disagree more than they agree. They don't even define freedom the same way. For Marx and Engels, freedom is an economic question. A person can choose, wish, and decide, but unless they have the economic or physical power to enforce their will, freedom is illusory. This is a classic Kantian theory from Grounding on the Metaphysics of Morals [9]. What a person “should” do is limited by what theycan actually do with the resources available. Thus, to have the freedom to choose where and how to live, a worker must have the economic resources necessary to do so. Since there is obviously a limited amount of wealth in the world, and any individual who owns significantly more than another enjoys proportionately more freedom. The disparity of wealth therefore reduces the relative freedom of the most deprived. So the way to create as much “good” as possible for as many people as possible (again, a Kantian precept) is to ensure that everyone has roughly the same resources and assets. According to Marx and Engels, the only way for a worker to enjoy the same level of economic autonomy as a factory owner is to actually be the owner of a factory, or co-owner, with an equal share in the capital.means of economic production. Hence their recommendation for massive economic leveling and redistribution, or collectivization, of resource ownership. For Mill, freedom is a legal and intellectual matter. The first freedoms he proclaims are freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Freedom to act (which is the primary concern of Marx and Engels) is rather a secondary consideration. For Mill, freedom is not an economic issue, except to the extent that an individual can choose to work for pay or to invest resources in a profitable enterprise. He is sure that a rich person enjoys freedoms that a poor person lacks, but the fact that one person has more financial options than another does not seem to concern him. Mill assumes that members of a free society will exercise the options available to them given the education, resources, and opportunities available to them. At no point does he suggest that these options are equal, or that they should be. Although Mill does not speak out against wealth redistribution or leveling, he raises the question of whether economic equality is a necessary precursor to freedom. For Mill, this is not the case. Nor is the question particularly important in his eyes, even if for Marx and Engels it is the only important question. Mill's discussion of money and property is limited to the moral and legal obligations he believes an adult should have in a free society. For example, Mill recommends that parents be responsible for providing education and financial support for their children. If a child were therefore to benefit from a deeper (and perhaps more expensive) education, creating better employment or investment opportunities, it is clear that some families would progress financially from one generation to the next while that other families would deteriorate or barely survive. For Mill, this is not a problem that requires optimization or interference. Instead of redistributing wealth or property in ways that create the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people, he proposes removing artificial legal and social barriers to individual achievement or experimentation. Mill's argument is that in the long run, the best and strongest innovations eventually prevail even when popular opinion opposes them. He cites the rise of Christianity, the heliocentric view of the solar system, and various other innovations to prove that it is impossible to keep a good idea quiet. Like early Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Mill argues that while it is impossible to predict exactly where the next brilliant invention will occur, the best way to cultivate such an breakthrough is to create a fertile environment in which innovation andexcellence are encouraged, or at least not. punished and where the incentive to excel is not removed or artificially reduced. When a person is not allowed to profit from initiative or risk-taking, and when the benefits are redirected to others who did not participate in the effort, the incentive to excel is definitely reduced. This could be one reason why Mill does not address the redistribution of wealth: his entire essay is so permeated by the laissez-faire mentality that it perhaps raises the question of whether a modicum of equality is necessary to freedom assuming that is not the case. . Such a mentality is only possible from a position of relative socio-economic privilege. The authors of both articles claim to examine what today might be called “the big picture,” but they disagree on how it is put together. Mill never addresses the question of whether, in his "free" society, an individual might be constrained by economic forces to the point of being unable to survive, much less participate productively. His assessment of the negative impact of one individual on another ends at the level of direct interaction and direct responsibility. Mill does not explore indirect causation. It never discusses whether decisions based on individual self-interest could, in the aggregate and on a global basis, on a large scale, create larger economic patterns and large-scale social conditions detrimental to the freedom of many more people than he has ever met. Perhaps his faith in an individual's ability to proactively change his own circumstances took precedence, or perhaps he simply encountered a true victim of circumstance. Either way, it ignores the complex consequences that are the cumulative effect of millions of small individual decisions. Yet Marx and Engels fully understand the phenomenon by which small decisions can, in the aggregate and over a long period of time, create a larger system that takes on a life and behavior of its own, creating an outcome that is not necessarily intended. or planned by decision-makers. They present the plight of the working class as the result of generations of self-serving bourgeois decision-making. The authors' proposed mechanisms for achieving freedom in a society could not be more different. Marx and Engels demand a massive restructuring of society, possibly accompanied by a real revolution. Mill does not recommend revolution but a healthy development of the personal initiative of the population. That a government should exist only at the pleasure of the governed is certainly part of his formula, but whereas Marx and Engels present this consent as something that was not given, Mill treats it as a manifest fact. For Mill, an optimal level of social and legal freedom can be achieved by proactive individuals participating in a democratic process with minimal restrictions on other activities such as commerce and industry. Both texts highlight the ways in which contemporary society has fallen short of the authors' ideal. . The social issues addressed by each author are different, but both are largely supported by primary and secondary sources. Therefore, in order to rank the presentation of one article on social ills and conflicts in 19th century Europe above another, it is necessary to determine not which position is better supported by the facts , but what are the most important facts. For Marx and Engels, the most pressing social problems linked to freedom are those whichaffect people's daily lives. In the Manifesto, they talk about the poor living conditions and lack of opportunities for the working class, especially when compared to the more comfortable lives of the elite. Engels carried out his own field work and research, describing the unhealthy, physically dangerous and degrading lives of the working class in England, the most industrialized nation of the time. His observations in “Conditions of the Working Class in England” [10] support this pessimistic view. Although one might be tempted to view Engels as a supporter of his own research, he was not alone in his criticisms and his observations were not unique. Robert Southey also condemned the standard of living of the English working class, citing not only disease and filth but also the depressing monotony of factory life.[11] Later historians generally agree that working life in the early industrial era was unpleasant and often short. For example, Olwen Hufton supports Marx and Engels in their description of the effect of the European working class lifestyle on women and families in the early 19th century: The lower classes, dependent on a multiplicity of expedients to produce enough to support a family, were of course condemned to a bitter struggle to make ends meet, and the bad lists highlight the plight of families reduced to poverty by death, disappearance or incapacity of the male breadwinner. The consequences of a system that required women to work but not have a professional career mentality produced, as it still does, countless victims when the ideal family model collapsed. [12]John Stuart Mill did not have Marx's personal experience with poverty nor Engels' desire to personally document the living conditions of the poor. Before writing On Liberty, it would be unlikely that he would have had to read Engels's "Conditions", which were not translated into English until 1886 [13] or perhaps even 1892 [ 14] (historians differ) despite the fact that the research was carried out in England. Mill was born into a privileged family. He received a good education and lucrative work opportunities, married the widow of a very wealthy man, and served in Parliament.[15] As with Marx and Engels, Mill's perception of the world around him derived largely from his own life experiences. The challenges and injustices he saw as a promising employee (and later officer) of the East India Company gave him insight into the negative effect a government can have on free enterprise. Yet his later years as an MP allowed him to understand the government's point of view and the need for some form of regulation to limit abuses of freedom by industry and individuals. It is therefore reasonable that he presents Europe's most pressing social conflicts as a struggle between individual (or industrial) freedom and government regulation. It would have been absurd for Mill to condemn industry or its industrial practices. Steeped in logic, reason, and utilitarianism, he would have relied heavily on quantitative measures of the quality of life of the working class to determine the merits of industrialization. Contemporary author Thomas Babington Macaulay, in "A Review of Southey's Colloquies", cites numerous facts and figures to show that life in industrial England was improving for everyone, even for factory workers. factory, because a rising tide floated all boats. He cites the low tax rates determined by the rollstax rates of 1825 and 1828, as well as the mortality rate in industrial centers. While Engels and Southey rely largely on qualitative statements to paint a picture of working-class life, Macaulay is purely quantitative. He does not attempt to assert that the working classes have advantages or equal opportunities, but bases his entire argument on the fact that the situation of the proletariat, although not idyllic, is better than it is. was before industrialization. Nay, the death rate in these three great capitals of the manufacturing districts is now considerably lower than it was fifty years ago, for England and Wales taken together, countryside and all. We could, with some plausibility, argue that people live longer because they are better fed, better housed, better clothed and better cared for in case of illness, and that these improvements are due to the increase in natural wealth produced by the manufacturing system. [16] Citing Neil McKendrick, Sir John Plumb, Roy Porter and John Brewer, Tim Blanning describes an increase in the standard of living across all classes, at least in terms of material goods. “What in the past was considered a luxury has now become a ‘decency’ and what was a decency has become a necessity.” [17] Furthermore, the bourgeoisie now had money to invest. Speculation, once reserved for wealthy independents, was now accessible to merchants and store owners. The influx of uninformed and relatively unsophisticated investors into the market, combined with the expansion of European economic interests, made it easy for frauds to eliminate unsuspecting investors. . John Law's Mississippi Bubble of 1719 contributed to the bankruptcy of the French monarchy, and the South Sea Bubble of 1720 bankrupted many British investors. [18] Mill is said to have witnessed the demise of the East India Trading Company and, as an MP from 1865 to 1868, he would have seen the result of the Opium Wars which began in 1839 to protect the monopoly of a British company on the market. Chinese opium trade. It is unclear how he would have voted on the 1970 bill condemning the opium trade. Sir Wilfred Lawson's bill was defeated by 151 votes to 47 due to the huge taxes levied on the sale of medicines [19]. Yet it was in this environment that Mill operated. People fought and died for British trade and industry.economic interests. Furthermore, in the not-so-distant past, philosophers such as Mill were put to death for daring to express their opinions, particularly on the subject of religion. For Mill, the conflict between the interests of the individual and those of the state was a struggle to the death, and freedom of speech and thought were the most fundamental freedoms and those most deserving of protection. The troubles of the working class, removed from his daily life, would have been just as academic to him as utilitarianism would have been to a worker in Engels' father's factory. Ultimately, the authors created their definitions of freedom based on what they themselves understood and valued. Their understandings and values ​​come from their own personal experience. It is evident that the definitions of freedom proposed by both authors are supported by primary and secondary sources. Yet Mill's position and the Marxist position are dialectical enough to be both supported and refuted by primary sources. Thus, the fact that Mill and the authors of the Manifesto lived in different worlds with radically different influences does not discredit their view of the. 1962.