Saturday, July 4, 2015

Cogito, General Will, Private Property

Rousseau's General Will is represented by Smith as an impersonal Invisible Hand, and by Kant as a superpersonal Pure Practical Reason. In contrast with each, perhaps with the advantage of greater hindsight, for Marx, seemingly, the meaning of the General Will is fully and concretely expressed in the anthemic "Allons" of the French Revolution. Accordingly, he can better recognize that the Practical 'We' of the latter supersedes the meditative 'I' of the Cogito that initiates the preceding Philosophical era. But, 'We' entails 'Our'. Hence, he surpasses the prevailing interpretations of Rousseau's innovation by proposing that Private Property is inconsistent with it.

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