The argument in the passage is similar to Marx’s critique of bourgeois rights, as articulated in On the Jewish Question. Marx argued that so-called “natural” or “human” rights are not universal moral truths but historical expressions of capitalist civil society, built around an abstract, isolated individual. As he put it, the right to liberty is based not on social relations but on “the separation of man from man,” and it culminates in the right to property, understood as “the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s property as one wills, without regard for other men.” So for Marx, the coexistence of expanding formal rights with exploding economic inequality is not a paradox: rights secure legal equality while leaving untouched the material relations that generate inequality.
Marx’s distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation helps explain both the instability of rights gains and their compatibility with growing corporate power. Political emancipation, the extension of civil and legal rights, can advance significantly while class domination deepens at the same time, because property relations remain sacrosanct. This is why Marx could insist that the “rights of man” ultimately protect “egoistic man” in civil society. From this standpoint, the book’s pairing of Rawls and James M. Buchanan is defensible: despite their differences. Both operate within an individualist framework that takes private property and rational choice as given. Buchanan’s constitutional political economy makes this especially explicit. In Marxian terms, then, individual-rights theory does not merely fail to prevent inequality; it actively stabilizes the social conditions that produce it, rendering rights achievements both limited and reversible. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39961): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39961 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116961607/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
