ABSTRACT
Jon Pike is staff tutor in Philosophy at The Open University, and author of From Aristotle to Marx: Aristotelianism in Marxist Social Ontology (1999). In this article, he discusses ‘On the Jewish Question’ principally as an attack on liberalism. Liberals typically believe that freedom consists in being politically free, that is, having such rights as a right to vote and to equality before the law. After setting the essay in context, Pike discusses Marx’s contrast between this liberal ‘political emancipation’ and ‘true human emancipation’. He shows how political emancipation relies on a damaging division of the individual into ‘citoyen’ (citizen) and ‘bourgeois’. In the final section, Pike contrasts this liberal view with Marx’s alternative: ‘a society of universal friendliness’.
