ABSTRACT
Marx's analysis of industrial society was far better than that of the earlier socialist literature. Even compared with the Reaction he was exquisitely preoccupied with social coercions. Marx saw factory tyranny, and instead assimilated it into the norms of the Enlightenment. The danger of Marxism lies in an essentially Rousseauian outcome. Rousseau nationalized coercions, eliminated alternatives, and the state became the only employer. Marx shared the tendency to dismiss the contributions of nineteenth-century liberalism after he had seized on the significance of the social problem. Marx was the first to link the Enlightenment ideals to reactionary insights. Marx had thought that the social question could not be dealt with without destroying the liberal state. Marx might see these reform movements as simply middle-class concessions, but that principle of his had altogether too much flexibility to it, so as to be incapable of ever being falsified.
