77TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)EXPLORING ISSUES The Limits of Authority
CHAPTER 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style 7777but, recognizing the disadvantages that might result from
free competition, he argued that the state must protect its
weaker members by acting to regulate the economy where
private initiative failed to do so. Mill feared that the gener-
al will—the will of unenlightened, propertyless masses—
might itself prove tyrannical and oppressive. In his classic
statement of the liberal creed,On Liberty(1859), he con-
cluded that “as soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects
prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction
over it.” For Mill, as for most nineteenth-century liberals,
government was obliged to intervene to safeguard and pro-
tect the wider interests of society.
Such theories met with strenuous opposition from
Europeansocialists. For the latter, neither conservatism nor
liberalism responded adequately to current social and eco-
nomic inequities. Socialists attacked capitalism as unjust;
they called for the common ownership and administration
of the means of production and distribution in the interest
of a public good. Society, according to the socialists, should
operate entirely in the interest of the needs of the people,
communally and cooperatively, rather than competitively.
The utopian socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)
envisioned a society free of state control, while the more
extremeanarchistsfavored the complete dissolution of the
state and the elimination of the force of law.
The Radical Views of Marx and Engels
The German theorist Karl Marx (1818–1883) agreed with
the socialists that bourgeois capitalism corrupted humanity,
but his theory of social reform was even more radical, for it
preached violent revolution that would both destroy the
old order and usher in a new society. Marx began his career
by studying law and philosophy at the university of Berlin.
Moving to Paris, he became a lifelong friend of the social
scientist and journalist Friedrich Engels (1820–1895).
Marx and Engels shared a similar critical attitude in respect
of the effects of European industrial capitalism. By 1848
they completed theCommunist Manifesto, a short treatise
published as the platform of a workers’ association called
the Communist League. The Manifesto, which still remains
the “guidebook” of Marxist socialism, demanded the
“forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” and
the liberation of the proletariat, or working class. Marx
offered an even more detailed criticism of the free enter-
prise system in Das Kapital, a work on which he toiled for
thirty years.
TheCommunist Manifestois a sweeping condemnation
of the effects of capitalism on the individual and society
at large. It opens with a dramatic claim: “The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
It further contends that capitalism concentrates wealth in
the hands of the few, providing great luxuries for some,
while creating an oppressed and impoverished proletariat.
The psychological effects of such circumstances, it holds,
are devastating: bourgeois capitalism alienates workers
from their own productive efforts and robs individuals of
their basic humanity. Finally, theManifestocalls for revolu-
tion by which workers will seize the instruments of capital-
istic production and abolish private ownership.
The social theories of Marx and Engels had enormous
practical and theoretical influence. They not only supplied
a justification for lower-class revolt, but they brought atten-
tion to the role of economics in the larger life of a society.
Marx perceived human history in exclusively materialistic
terms, arguing that the conditions under which one earned
a living determined all other aspects of life: social, political,
and cultural. A student of Hegel (see chapter 27), he
viewed history as a struggle between “haves” (thesis) andIn On Liberty, John Stuart Mill examined the nature of freedom,
advocating individual rights over those of the state. He argued,
however, that it was the legitimate duty of government to limit
the exercise of any freedom that might harm other members of
the community. Wrestling with key issues concerning limits to the
authority of the state with regard to the individual, he asked,
“What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual
over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How
much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how
much to society?”
Enlarging more generally on these questions, Mill’s American
contemporary Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) observed, “The
legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people
whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not
so well do for themselves in their separate and individual
capacities.” Is providing for the needsof the community—much
like providing protectionfor its citizens—the function of the
government? Suppose the political process of providing for these
needs (like the obligation to protect the individual) comes at the
cost of limiting the absolute freedom of others?
To one degree or another, most of the great political divisions
emerging from nineteenth-century social thought proceeded from
these questions. They are still debated today, mainly in the
opposing political ideologies of liberalismand conservatism.
Contemporary liberals would incline toward a relatively greater
use of government authority in serving the needs of society.
Conservatives would incline toward a relatively lesser exercise
of such control.