ABSTRACT

This chapter explores what positive normative role, if any, 'bourgeois' ideals—freedom, equality, and justice—play in Karl Marx's critique of capitalism and his vision of communism. Marx's normative position in 'On the Jewish Question' is grounded, no less than Hegel's, in an empirical understanding of the specific institutional circumstances of modernity—especially the nature of civil society—under which the conceptions of freedom at issue are realized. The normative role of bourgeois equality would remain merely negative if Marx ascribed no positive value to it outside the capitalist mode of production—if, for example, he thought it played no role in what makes communism a good social order. The chapter argues that, with respect to his own normative commitments, Marx replaces the bourgeois conception of freedom with a fundamentally different, 'communist' conception of freedom rather than appropriating it in some revised form that is appropriate to communist society.