The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and published for the first time in 1848 [1], precedes the writing of Sulla John Stuart Mill's freedom of a decade. Although Mill and Marx were both living in England when On Liberty was published in 1859 [2], the two authors moved in different environments. While Mill was a high-ranking employee of the East India Company [3], Marx had emigrated to London in 1849 and was living in relative poverty despite his hard work and notoriety [4]. So for Marx and Engels Mill was more a contemporary than a companion. Like the two authors whose paths overlapped in space and time without truly 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 Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Although both The Communist Manifesto and On Freedom have created huge paradigm shifts in the social sciences and have many themes in common, they were written for different audiences to achieve different goals. The Manifesto is primarily a socioeconomic treatise while On Freedom is more concerned with 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 the same field. The two articles, consequently, should not be regarded as opposed to each other, except perhaps on the topic of Kantian moral theory. Both authors place a high value on personal freedom. They share an optimistic view of a free individual's ability to judge what is best for his or her own interests, but they also recognize the power of “society” at large to act as a moral or legal authority. Both make optimistic predictions about how humans in a state of freedom (i.e. not overly oppressed) will choose to behave. Each author expands his hypotheses to describe an optimal state of affairs that would bring as much freedom as possible to as many people as possible. Yet the authors differ so profoundly in their definitions of what freedom is and what states of affairs are 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 a civil and legal phenomenon linked to the interactions between a state and the individuals that compose it. It is clear that Marx, Engels, and Mill all believe that personal freedom has value. In the Communist Manifesto the importance of being able to do what one wants is considered so obvious that Marx and Engels speak of freedom mainly in a negative sense. 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 that class to control the price of labor, to the detriment of the working proletariat. Forced to compete for job 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 “arrive at an adequate balance between individual independence and social control” [6]. Instead of viewing this struggle as evil or heretical, and instead of condemning people who question or seek to limit the authority of a governmentestablished by divine right, Mill presents conflict between individuals and their government as natural and appropriate. He thus assigns to personal freedom the same moral value as government. Furthermore, it clearly states that “[it is] desirable, in short, that in things that 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 himself. They are also optimistic about how humans would behave in a state of freedom. Marx and Engels do not ask whether a working-class individual is capable of making intelligent decisions about where and how to live, or how to manage the parts of the means of production that are under his control. Once the bourgeoisie has been eliminated and the last vestiges of bourgeois culture and values ​​have been swept away, Marx and Engels state that the proletariat will create a community in which "the free development of each person is the condition of the free development of all". [8] In other words, the community as a whole, and the individuals who compose it, would be so anxious to protect the freedom of their peers, that they would not consider themselves free or prosperous until someone developed freely into the future. better than his abilities and desires. To this end, the Manifesto proposes making public schools free. The authors assume that people who have access to these educational options will choose to exercise them, and that workers will willingly and willingly continue to work even without economic pressure or incentive to do so. Like Marx and Engels, Mill is optimistic about universal education. While he does not name the government as an adequate provider of education except for the poorest students, he recommends forcing parents to purchase the education they deem appropriate and affordable for their children. It offers no suggestions as to how exactly such policies would be enforced or how public schools would be funded. Unlike Marx and Engels, Mill recognizes that some individuals will abuse their freedom. It does not claim that freedom produces right and morally appropriate actions except in the long term. While he dismisses 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 get hurt. But it stops short of recommending legal sanctions against the irresponsible. Instead, it relies on social “disapproval.” It proposes limiting the state's ability to punish an offender in proportion to that offender's impact on others. Mill doesn't say exactly how that impact might be measured or repaid, especially in the case of violent crime. However, 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 agree. They don't even define freedom the same way. For Marx and Engels, freedom is an economic question. A person can choose, desire and decide, but unless that individual has the economic or physical power to enforce their will, freedom is illusory. This is the classic Kantian theory taken from the Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals [9]. What a person “should” do is limited by what they can actually do with available resources. Therefore, to have the freedom to choose where and how to live, a worker must have the economic resources to do so. Since there is obviously a finite amount of wealth in the world, and each individual who owns much more than another enjoys it in proportiongreater freedom. Wealth inequality consequently reduces the relative freedom of the have-nots. Therefore, the way to create as much “good” as possible for as many people as possible (again, a Kantian precept) is to make sure that everyone has more or less the same resources and resources. According to Marx and Engels, the only way a worker can enjoy the same level of economic autonomy as a factory owner is if he or she is actually a factory owner, or co-owner, with an equal share in the means of economic production. Hence their recommendation for massive economic leveling and a 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 of primary importance to Marx and Engels) is more of an afterthought. For Mill, freedom is not an economic matter except to the extent that an individual can choose to engage in work for compensation or to invest resources in some profitable enterprise. Certainly a rich person has the freedom that a poor person lacks, but the fact that one person has more financial options than another doesn't seem to bother him. Mill assumes that people in a free society will exercise the options available to them given the education, resources, and opportunities they possess. At no point does he suggest that these options are the same or that they should be. While Mill does not speak out against redistribution or leveling of wealth, he raises the question of whether economic equality is a necessary precursor to freedom. For Mill it is not. Nor is the question particularly significant for him, although 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 that he believes an adult in a free society should have. For example, Mill recommends that parents be required to provide education and financial support for their children. If a child were then to benefit from a deeper (and perhaps more expensive) education, creating better job or investment opportunities, it is clear that some families would advance financially from one generation to the next while other families would fare worse or barely survive. This, for Mill, is not a problem requiring optimization or interference. Instead of redistributing wealth or property so as to 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 thesis is that, in the long run, the best and most valuable innovations ultimately prevail even when popular opinion is against them. He cites the rise of Christianity, the heliocentric view of the solar system, and various other innovations as proof that it's impossible to keep a good idea hidden. Like an 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 progress is to create a fertile environment in which innovation and excellence are encouraged, or at least not encouraged. punished and where the incentive to excel is not artificially removed or reduced. When a person is not allowed to profit from initiative or risk-taking, and when the resulting benefits are redirected to others who did not participate in the effort, the incentive to excel is greatly reduced. This may 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 couldeffectively raise the question of whether a modicum of equality is necessary for freedom, assuming that it is not. . Only from a position of relative socioeconomic privilege is such a mentality possible. The authors of both articles purport to look at what today might be called “the big picture,” but they disagree about how it is made up. Mill never addresses the question of whether, in his “free” society, an individual could be constrained by economic forces to the point where he could not 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 causality. He never discusses whether decisions based on individual self-interest could, overall and on a large scale, create broader economic patterns and large-scale social conditions detrimental to the freedom of many more individuals than he has ever encountered. Perhaps his belief in an individual's ability to proactively change their situation took precedence, or perhaps he simply encountered a true victim of circumstance. In any case, it ignores the complex consequences that are the cumulative effect of millions of small individual decisions. Yet Marx and Engels perfectly understand the phenomenon that the smallest decisions can, taken together and over a long period of time, create a larger system that takes on a life and behavior of its own, creating an outcome not necessarily foreseen or intended by the decision makers. They present the plight of the working class as the result of generations of self-serving bourgeois decision-making. The mechanisms proposed by the authors for achieving freedom in a society could not be more different. Marx and Engels call for a massive restructuring of society, possibly with a full-blown revolution. Mill recommends not revolution but a healthy development of personal initiative on the part of the population. That a government should exist only for the pleasure of the governed is certainly part of its formula, but whereas Marx and Engels present this consent as something that has not been 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 trade and industry. Both texts highlight the ways in which contemporary society has failed to achieve the authors' ideal. . The social problems addressed by each author are different, but both are widely supported by primary and secondary sources. Therefore, to rank one article's presentation of social evils and conflicts in 19th-century Europe above another, it is necessary to determine not which position is best supported by the facts, but which facts are the most important. the most urgent social problems related to freedom are those that affect people's daily lives. In the Manifesto they write about the poor living conditions and lack of opportunities for the working class, particularly when compared to the more comfortable lives of the elite. Engels performed his own field work and research, describing the unhealthy, physically dangerous, and degrading life of the working class in England, the most heavily industrialized nation of the time. His observations in “The Conditions of the Working Class of England” [10] support the pessimistic view. While one might be tempted to view Engels as biased in favor of his own research, he was not alone in his criticism and his observations were not unique. Robert Southey similarly condemned the standard of living of the English working class, quotingnot only the disease and dirt but also the depressing monotony of factory life [11]. Later historians generally agree that working-class 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 early 19th-century women and families: The lower classes, dependent on a multiplicity of expedients to produce enough to support a family, were obviously condemned to a ruthless struggle to make ends meet, and the lists of the poor make abundantly clear the difficult situation of families reduced to need by the death, disappearance or incapacity of the male head of the family. The consequences of a system that insisted that women work but lack a professional career mentality produced then, as still, countless victims as the ideal family model collapsed. [12]John Stuart Mill did not have Marx's personal experience of poverty or Engels' desire to personally document the living conditions of the poor. Before writing On Freedom, he should hardly have read Engels' “Conditions”, which were translated into English only in 1886 [13] or perhaps even in 1892 [14] (historians differ) despite the fact that research was conducted in England. Mill was born into a privileged family. He received a solid education and lucrative job opportunities, married the widow of a very rich man, and served in Parliament [15]. As with Marx and Engels, Mill's perception of the world around him derived largely from his life experiences. The challenges and injustices he saw as an emerging (and later official) employee of the East India Company gave him great insight into the negative effect a government can have on free enterprise. Yet his final years as a Member of Parliament (MP) allowed him to see the government's point of view on the problems 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 competition between individual (or industrial) freedom and government regulation. For Mill to condemn industry or industrial practice would have been absurd. Steeped as he was in logic, reason, and utilitarianism, he would have relied heavily on quantitative measurements of the quality of working-class life in determining the merits of industrialization. Contemporary author Thomas Babington Macaulay, in “A Review of Southey's Colloquies,” cites numerous facts and figures to demonstrate that life in industrial England was improving for everyone, even the workers, because a rising tide makes you float all boats. He cites the low rates determined from the tax rolls of 1825 and 1828, and also the death rate in industrial centers. While Engels and Southey relied heavily on qualitative statements to paint a picture of working-class life, Macaulay is purely quantitative. He does not attempt to argue that the working classes have equal advantages or opportunities, but bases his entire argument on the fact that the situation of the proletariat, although not idyllic, is better than it was before industrialization. Indeed, the death rate in those three great manufacturing district capitals is now considerably lower than it was fifty years ago, than in England and Wales taken together, open country and all. We could argue with some plausibility that people live longer because they are better fed, better housed, better dressed andbetter assisted in case of illness, and that these improvements are due to the increase in natural wealth that the manufacturing system has produced. [16] Citing Neil McKendrick, Sir John Plumb, Roy Porter and John Brewer, Tim Blanning describes an increase in living standards across all classes, at least in terms of material goods. “What was once seen as a luxury has now become 'decency' and what had been decency has now become a necessity.” [17] Furthermore, the bourgeoisie now had money to invest. Speculation, previously the preserve of the independent wealthy, was now accessible to merchants and shop owners. The influx of uninformed and relatively unsophisticated investors into the market, combined with the expansion of European business interests, has made it easy for frauds to wipe out unsuspecting investors. . John Law's 1719 Mississippi Bubble contributed to the bankruptcy of the French monarchy, and the 1720 South Sea Bubble bankrupted many British investors. [18] Mill would witness first-hand the demise of the East India Trading Company and, as an MP from 1865 to 1868, would witness the outcome of the Opium Wars that began in 1839 to protect a British company's monopoly on the market. Chinese opium trade. It is not known how he would have voted on the 1970 bill to condemn the opium trade. Sir Wilfred Lawson's bill was soundly rejected by 151 votes in favor and 47 against due to the high taxes resulting from the sale of drugs [19]. Yet this is the environment in which Mill operated. People fought and died for British trade and British industrial economic interests. Furthermore, in the not too distant past, philosophers like Mill had been put to death for daring to express their opinion, especially on matters of religion. For Mill, the conflict between the interests of the individual and those of the state was a life-and-death struggle, and freedom of speech and thought were the fundamental liberties and those most deserving of protection. The problems of the working class, remote as they were from his daily life, would have been as academic to him as utilitarianism would have been to a worker in Engels' father's factory. themselves understood and valued. Their understandings and values ​​were derived from their personal experience. It is evident that both authors' definitions of freedom are supported by both primary and secondary sources. Yet both Mill's and Marxist positions are dialectical enough to be supported and refuted by primary sources. So the fact that Mill and the Manifesto writers lived in different worlds with radically different influences does not discredit either of them's worldview. The question of which definition of freedom best fits the social and economic issues of the times therefore depends on which worldview and which set of values ​​best aligns with the reader's point of view. Notes[1] Morgan, Michael L. (ed.). Classics of moral and political theory. P. 1158; Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. 1992.[2] ibid. P. 1043[3] ibid. P. 1042[4] ibid. P. 1159[5] Marx, Carlo; Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. From the complete works of Marx and Engels. International Publishers, Inc., 1975. Reprinted by Hackett Publishing Co., 1992. See Morgan, op. cit. [1], p.1195[6] Mill, John Stuart. On Freedom. From 1869 4th ed., Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer. Reprinted by Hackett Publishing Co., 1992. See Morgan, op. cit. [1], p. 1047[7] ibid. p.1078[8] Marx, op. cit. [5] page. 1207[9] Kant, Emmanuel. Foundations on the metaphysics of morality. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Co., 1981. Reprinted by Hackett Publishing Co., 1992. See Morgan, op. cit. [1], p.1032.[10] Engels, Friedrich.. 1962.