TITLE:
Rights and Property Rights: A Reflection Based on the Perspective of Young Marx
AUTHORS:
Zixuan Jiang
KEYWORDS:
Rights, Property Rights, Civil Society, German-French Yearbook
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.11,
October
19,
2022
ABSTRACT: Modern Western political philosophy has formed paths
around rights and property rights regarding the realization of individual
freedom: early political philosophers emphasized the precedence of rights, and
the category that best embodies individual rights is property rights. In
contrast, the tradition of German political philosophy is to introduce rights
from freedom, with rights as the external realization of inner ideas and
property rights as the precondition and guarantee of human freedom. Young Marx
explained the creation of property with the theory of alienation, pointing out
that private property and money as the basis of civil society are the root of
human alienation. Thus, Marx’s communist vision of renouncing private property
to achieve individual freedom based on the association of free men formed a
different ideological progression from the rights paradigm.