Homer, Winslow. The Summit of Whiteface Mountain. 1873. Oil on canvas. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville.
Thoreau, Henry David Walking
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.
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."
Sanford Robinson Gifford, Kauterskill Falls, 1862, Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Thoreau, Henry David Walden, or A Life in the Woods
Daumier, Honore The Uprising L'Emeute
Marx The Revolutions of 1848 Political Writings volume 1
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles
Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860, Oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.
Thoreau, Henry David Resistance to Civil Government
marx
Marx Communist Manifesto
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, Unite!
Frederick Douglass (circa 1879) (cropped)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
But just as he was leaning over to get the stick, I seized him with both hands by the collar, and brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground.
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
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.