Chapter Title ROUSSEAU AND MARX Book Title Rousseau the Age of Enlightenment and Their Legacies Book Author s Robert Wokler Book Editor s Bryan Garsten Published by Princeton University Press Stable URL http www jstor com stable j ctt7sn2t 18 JSTOR is a not for profit service that helps scholars researchers and students discover use and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship For more information about JSTOR please contact support jstor org Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms Conditions of Use available at https about jstor org terms Princeton University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize preserve and extend access to Rousseau the Age of Enlightenment and Their Legacies This content downloaded from cid 0 136 244 210 68 on Tue 09 Jan 2024 19 12 22 00 00 cid 0 cid 0 All use subject to https about jstor org terms cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 Chapter 12 ROUSSEAU AND MARX I The political theories of Rousseau and Marx arouse stronger feelings than do most doctrines and they have exercised a greater influence on the course of social revolutions than have the ideas of any other modern writers But while each continues to attract widespread interest they are seldom compared with one another and only in Italy has there been any extensive discussion of the nature of the conceptual relations between them Bobbio Cotta Mondolfo and Marramao have all written on the subject over the past forty years or so 1 and Galvano della Volpe and Lucio Colletti have each devoted books to it which proved sufficiently popular to warrant several editions 2 English readers accordingly should be thankful to New Left Books and Lawrence and Wishart for recently pub lishing translations of the two main works about Rousseau and Marx in that tradition della Volpe s Rousseau e Marx and Colletti s Ideologia e societ 3 though some may wonder at the bearing of these texts upon their subject once they have been shorn from the world of Italian Marx ism to which they belong Della Volpe s book whose English edition ap peared in 1978 is a collection of essays written for the most part over twenty years earlier in which the author s principal aim is to assess what he takes to be the limited egalitarianism of Rousseau and Marx and to rescue this doctrine from some of its Stalinist misinterpreters Colletti s more engaging and better argued work confronts the views of della Volpe in the manner of a courteous critic invoking the authority of scholarly essays drawn from the most respectable and bourgeois French and Eng lish academic journals To my mind each of these books offers a provoca tive but not always illuminating treatment of the subject largely because in translation they have been plucked from their time and context To gether with Touchstone in As You Like It I think it can be said about them that When they were at home they were in a better place Far more satisfactory in my view though regrettably less familiar even to English readers is the commentary by John Plamenatz in his account of Karl Marx s Philosophy of Man 4 to which my remarks here owe an intel lectual debt I am happy to acknowledge Such links as would connect the philosophies of Rousseau and Marx ought of course to form a subject of interest in themselves not least to This content downloaded from cid 0 136 244 210 68 on Tue 09 Jan 2024 19 12 22 00 00 cid 0 cid 0 All use subject to https about jstor org terms cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 cid 0 ROUSSEAU AND MARX 215 historians of ideas engaged in tracing Rousseau s influence or locating Marx s sources From time to time scholars have in fact attempted to es tablish the intellectual influence exercised by Rousseau over Marx par ticularly as it may have been mediated by Marx s father who according to Eleanor Marx knew his Rousseau and Voltaire by heart 5 A few com mentators have been intrigued too by the fact that in 1843 Marx turned to a meticulous reading of the Social Contract and in his Kreuznach note books transcribed no less than 103 passages from that work all of which incidentally are still readily identifiable today 6 And if we know from Marx himself that he read Rousseau s most important study of politics with such diligent care it might appear from Engels s testimony that he was at least equally if not more impressed by Rousseau s second major contribution to political thought that is the Discourse on Inequality since in Anti D hring Engels observed that this work includes a se quence of ideas which in its dialectical detail corresponds exactly gleich auf ein Haar with Marx s own masterpiece Capital 7 Yet if such evidence seems fertile ground for plotting the course of a historical influence or mapping the extent of a historical debt it is fertile ground stretched thinly over unnegotiable channels As both della Volpe and Colletti have ruefully observed Marx despite his considerable debt to Rousseau never gave any indication of being remotely aware of it 8 There are no more than some twenty two references to Rousseau any where in the corpus of Marx s published writings including his letters and most of these are just passing citations 9 His father may have known his Rousseau and Voltaire by heart but Karl seemed scarcely able to dis tinguish them and on at least one of the occasions that he mentions Rousseau he speaks of the philosophy of Rousseau Voltaire 10 as if this pair of mortal enemies of the Enlightenment formed a Gilbertonsullivan compound each standing for much the same as the other Marx must have left his painstaking notes from the Social Contract behind when in his introduction to the Grundrisse he likened the citizens of Rousseau s ideal state to naturally independent Robinson Crusoes coming together through covenants to engage in freely competitive social relations on the model later elaborated by Smith and Ricardo 11 For though Robinson Crusoe is indeed a book Rousseau admired it is in Emile that he com mends it12 and nowhere in the Social Contract and neither a desert state nor one of freely competitive social relations has any place at all in the political argument of that work R Wokler intended in the event that this article was reprinted to add a note