The Rights of the Egoistic Man

 In On the Jewish Question, Marx argues that the rights proclaimed by declarations of rights from North America and France are the rights of the "egoistic man", a man understood as separate from others and from the community (42). Political emancipation through rights may represent real progress, but Marx insists that these rights operate within a framework that takes separation and self-interests as basic futures of human life. 

Marx's critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man focuses on liberty, equality, security, and property. Liberty is defined as "the right to do everything which does not harm others" (42). Property is the right to dispose / use of one's possessions independently of society, and security concerns only the protectio of one's person and property (42-43). Together, these are negative rights. They protect individuals from one another rather than orient them toward collective life. 

Marx argues that political commuity becomes "a mere means" for preserving private rights, rather than an end in its own right (43). As a result, the individual as bourgeois is treated as the "true and authentic man,"  while the citizen comes in as second, and whose political activity serves private life (43). 

This division is what Marx calls a "double existence" (34). In political life, individuals appear as members of a community, but in everyday social life they confront one another as isolated individuals, often treating each other as means. Political emancipation grants equal citizenship while the actual economics and social world of inequality, property, and competition continues unchanged. For Marx, this is a form of alienation, since our capacity for collective life is detached from our material existence. 

While Marx analyzes specific rights, I wonder if he is arguing that : 

(a) these particular rights are the problem : perhaps different rights (or rights formulated differently) wouldn't protect egoism

or (b) rights as such are the problem: perhaps it is that any right, by its nature as an invididual entitlement, will assume separation and subordinate community to private interest 

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