Rousseau and Marx: "On the Jewish Question"

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 In his "On the Jewish Question," Marx provides an account of "political society" that is strikingly similar to Rousseau's: "Here, where he appears both to himself and to others as a real individual he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the contrary, where he is regarded as a species-being, man is the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality" (34). Rousseau follows a very similar argument that in modern society, man takes on a false appearance to increase his own power and subdue those with less power. This tendency to be "illusory" can be traced back to the value of esteem that arose during the earlier developments of man and was aggravated by property rights and growing inequality. Moreover, Rousseau's Social Contract encompasses the notion of the general will, which like the perfected state as conceived by Marx, embodies the universality of associations and natural liberties. 

Through his elaboration on the Social Contract, Rousseau argues that the general will ensures equality as it is willed by every citizen who obeys the general will. In other words, because every citizen is a contributor to the general will and wills it, every citizen remains free. Rousseau also argues that citizens must give up their natural liberties, which reflect their tendencies to freely act upon their appetites. Marx seems to extend Rousseau's argument by introducing a novel idea: there is a clear contradiction between the political state and its presuppositions (including religion) and the civil state (35). Marx claims that religion is "the essence of differentiation" and the cause of man's separation "from the community, from himself and from other men" (35). This then serves as the basis of his arguments about Judaism, which he claims has a "human basis of...practical need and egoism" (54). 

Marx's account is interesting in that it seems to use Rousseau's denouncement of man's egoism, which developed as a result of inequalities and unregulated appetites, to bolster his religious argument. This begs an interesting question: would Rousseau still believe in his Social Contract if it meant that the sorrows of society he tried to correct through his contract could be used to justify the emancipation of an entire religious founding?

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