Author: Laura Reagan

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Read more about the article John Stuart Mill On Liberty
John Stuart Mill by London Stereoscopic Company, c1870

John Stuart Mill On Liberty

The subject of this Essay is ... Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognised as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilised portions of the species have now[Pg 2] entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treatment. The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England.

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Read more about the article Marx: Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
Cruikshank, George. Robinson Crusoe on his Raft. 1831

Marx: Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

"The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. It is no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by means of a contract. This is the semblance and only the aesthetic semblance of the Robinsonades, great and small."

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Read more about the article Marx Early Writings
Gustave Courbet The Stonebreakers

Marx Early Writings

The basis of representation, its essence, turns out to be 'something wholly superfluous, etc.' for representation. With one and the same breath Hegel puts forward absolutely contradictory statements: representation is grounded on trust, on the confidence placed by one man in another, and, at the same time, it is not grounded on trust. It is rather a merely formal game. The object of representation is not the particular interest but man and his citizenship of the state, the universal interest. On the other hand, the particular interest is the material of representation and the spirit of this interest is the spirit of the representative. p.197

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Read more about the article De Tocqueville Democracy in America
Leon Noel Alexis de Tocqueville en 1848

De Tocqueville Democracy in America

The most natural privilege of man, next to the right of acting for himself, is that of combining his exertions with those of his fellow-creatures, and of acting in common with them. I am therefore led to conclude that the right of association is almost as inalienable as the right of personal liberty. No legislator can attack it without impairing the very foundations of society.

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Read more about the article Hegel The Elements of the Philosophy of Right
The revolutions of 1820 5 ForHegelPhilofRight

Hegel The Elements of the Philosophy of Right

A treatise in philosophy is usually not expected to be constructed on such a pattern, perhaps because people suppose that a philosophical product is a Penelope’s web which must be started anew every day. This treatise differs from the ordinary compendium mainly in its method of procedure. It must be under-stood at the outset that the philosophic way of advancing from one matter to another, the general speculative method, which is the only kind of scientific proof available in philosophy, is essentially different from every other. Only a clear insight into the necessity for this difference can snatch philosophy out of the ignominious condition into which it has fallen in our day.

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