Camille: Marx and Rousseau on the Individual and the Collective

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    What has resonated with me most from the past two readings is the philosopher's attempt at understanding the relationship between an individual and the collective. Both Rousseau and Marx (in addition to others like Locke) attempt to rationalize and understand the fundamental relationship between an individual and the state and how an individual can maintain their rights and self-sovereignty while under a collective authority. Rousseau states that one must surrender everything to the general will to be truly free and the master of himself. The social contract and the idea of the general will is his attempt at understanding a legitimate way in which an individual can retain their freedom (and gain even more) by being under another authority.

    Marx outlines a division between the political state and civil society. Civil society is the “state of need and of reason” where individuals are separated from the community, occupied by their private interests, and driven by ego. Therefore man is almost separated between the egoistic man of civil society and the species-being of the political community. He states that human emancipation happens when the individual man has absorbed himself into the abstract citizen and become a species-being. Like Rousseau, he claims that this dissolution of the self to the general leads to even more powerful, abstract, and dignified rights. While in civil society, one has the rights of man, which are based on the individual’s right to self-interest and how others place limitations on him, in a political state, people gain the rights of the citizen. The revolution from the old society (and from the civil society) leads to the understanding of a more general concern for the people, where political functions become general functions instead of the more egoistic and practical needs; in the political society, one considers themselves as a communal being, whereas, in the civil society, one acts as a private individual. It is interesting, however, that civil society still acts as a precondition for political society.

    What I don’t understand is his passage on how “being members of society, we inadvertently deprive ourselves of a “real individual life” in exchange for an “unreal universality.” It seems as though the answer to human emancipation is only possible if we remove the evils of practical need and self-interest. In doing so, do we exchange our real individual lives for the phantom abstract of being a citizen?

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