Rousseau, Marx and private property

Abstract

Rousseau is known as one of the first critics of the bourgeois society. As early as the XVIII century his speech differs from that of the others. As professor Lucio Colletti writes: “the main reason for the break between Rousseau and the philosophes can be found on the differences of principles, and above all, different attitude toward ‘civil society’”. The private property, so important to modern society, appears, to the philosopher from Geneva, as the turning point of a process of distortion and alienation of humankind. In his second Discourse Rousseau begins to open the way that, almost a century later, would be explored by Karl Marx, which identifies, in the essence of private property, the alienation, or, estrangement, of the humankind which Rousseau had already pointed. The hypothesis that guides us could be expressed by the following sentence: the critique of private property plays a similar role on the argument of both. They recognize on the process of developing of private property the actualization, the realization, of the estate
of alienation of man in regard to his own essential powers.