Jean Jacques Rousseau Discourse On Inequality

Throughout the course of History countless philosophers have written about the idea of utopian societies. This idea is such an intriguing topic to philosophers, because theoretically Utopian societies are impossible, so trying to come up plausible societies in which everything is perfect presents a kind of challenge for them. Of the many philosophers that have given their two cents on the matter, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx’s are two of the more interesting ones. In Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, he writes about this idea of man in the state of nature, and how that the primitive state of man would actually be the ideal form of society. In Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto he writes about communism and how the ideal society would …show more content…
Man knows that he needs food to survive, he is attracted to the female, and that sleep is a necessity. He also knows that he finds the feeling of hunger and pain to be unpleasant. When comparing man in his primitive state to present day man one key difference is that present day man has exponentially more problems than primitive state man. But why is this the case? Rousseau believes that the reason for why man in his primitive state has far less problems than current day man is due to the faculty of …show more content…
Who wouldn’t want to live in a society where everyone was treated equally, everything that you need is provided by the state, and marriage can finally be based off love and love alone, because all other factors that play a part in marriage (money, social climbing, property, inheritance,etc) have been removed from society. But as the world has shown us time and time again, almost everything good in life comes with a price. On paper communism seems too good to be true; so what’s the catch? In order to find the catch one needs to first examine the core belief of communism. Luckily Marx likes to get right to the point when he writes. “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”(Marx 22) Now everybody knows that this is the core communist belief. However, what many people do not know is that by abolishing private property the free market was abolished as well. It may not seem like it, but the removal of the free market from society is one of the main reasons why communism failed. Think about all of the planning it takes to build something with a tremendous amounts of resources like a skyscraper or a bridge. The people in charging of running the operation base everything they do on the market prices of the necessary resources. But when these resources are owned by the