General Will and Private Property

Plainly influencing Marx in his Introduction to his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is the French Revolution, and, hence, Rousseau. Accordingly implicit in the passages is both a critique of Capitalism, and a clarification of his championing of the Proletariat. For, Smith, too, is influenced by Rousseau, with his Invisible Hand a representation of the General Will of the latter. However, one significant distinction between the two concepts is that while the General Will is the expression of a social condition that precedes Private Property, the Invisible Hand not only presupposes the latter, but preserves and, perhaps, redeems it, as the principle of Justice in Smith's system. The distinction thus illustrates that Private Property hinders social integration. from which Marx likely inferred that the only possible concrete locus of any universal Practical principle is the property-less Proletariat.