Mill and Marx, Views of Society

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Mill and Marx, Views of Society

Mill's assertion of individual liberty imposed two conditions upon the individual: the individual's conduct must not injure the interests of another, and each individual had to bear his or her share of the labors and sacrifices necessary to defend society or its members from injury or molestation. Society was justified in enforcing these two limits at all costs by the exaction of either legal or social penalties.

Marx's theory postulated an entrenched stratification of society based almost entirely on economic differences between social classes. Marx described a class system under which economic position determined class ranking and influenced mobility, and for Marx there was no true social mobility but a rigid stratification into the bourgeois and proletarian classes. For Marx, social classes were part of a system of economic exploitation, with the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, controlling the means of production and exploiting the work of the proletariat, or working class. Marx believed that this exploitation of the working class would lead inevitably to class conflict and to the destruction of the system of capitalism with the violent overthrow of that system. It would then be replaced by a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leading in time to a classless society, as noted. The succeeding state after capitalism would be a form of socialism. This would only be a transitional period marked by a dictatorship of the

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Liberalism developed from the Enlightenment's critique of eighteenth-century absolutism as both a political and economic theory. Government power was now to be kept to a minimum in order to promote and protect individual freedom. The idea that that government is best which governs least is an expression of liberal orthodoxy. Liberals wanted to impose constitutional limits on government and to remove restrictions on individual enterprise, specifically to remove state regulation of the economy. In the economic realm, this was manifested as a belief in laissez-faire policies. In the economic realm Adam Smith stated the liberal position in writings such as An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith recommended freeing the economy from the control of the state. At the time, the mercantilist system prevailed by which the state regulated prices and the conditions of manufacture for goods. Smith argued that the free forces of the marketplace should shape economic decisions, and Smith was the primary advocate of the French view of laissez faire, or letting the economy run on its own. Thomas Malthus suggested that wages and employment were also subject to the laws of supply and demand, and he expressed this idea in his An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus suggested that if employers paid their workers higher salaries, the workers who were better off would marry earlier and have more children. This would mean more workers in the marketplace, which would drive wages down. Malthus thus blamed the workers for their own poverty. A third important economist of the time was David Ricardo, who in his Principles of Political Economy stated that capitalists had to depress wages in order to remain competitive. Underlying the views of all these economists was the idea that the economy is driven by laws and that state intervention would circumvent those laws and cause the situation to deteriorate.

Marx's theory postulated an e

1986

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		Communist Party \| Hume Marx \| Political Economy \| Marx Britain \| Nations Smith \| Marx Moore \| Population Malthus \| \| Barrington Moore \| Britain Britain \| social classes \| class conflict \| means production \| dictatorship proletariat \| classes marx \| proletariat leading \| dictatorship proletariat leading \| system economic \| economic relations \| leading classless society \| leading classless \| social contract \| proletariat leading classless \| true social mobility \| marx true social \|