Marx And Hobbes Similarities

Born more than 100 years apart Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx were political thinkers from different time periods with different areas of emphasis that posed very provocative questions about society that we are still asking today. Both Rousseau and Marx did not agree with the classic liberal thinkers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The majority of commonalities between Rousseau and Marx are in the fact that they refuted parts of Hobbes and Locke, that is where the comparisons between the two end also. The root of each man’s disagreement comes from a very different place and pose arguments that are centered on different ideas, Marx took issue with the liberal idea of an economic class system while Rousseau did not accept Hobbes’ or Locke’s take on the “state of nature”.
One aspect of liberalism that both men saw as a source of inequality was property. Marx believed that the only way to achieve social equality was to remove private property “The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's property and to dispose of it at one's discretion (a son gre), without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it.” (Marx, On the Jewish Question,1843,13). His belief that private property only creates envy and turns men against each other is illustrated in this quote from “On the Jewish Question”. Rousseau also believed that gross inequality came from private