This alienation can easily allow certain individuals or groups of society to take advantage of the situation of the alienated masses. The upper and ruling classes are in such a position, as the “ruling material power of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual power,” according to Marx (M, 814). With intellectual superiority, therefore, the upper classes are in a position in which they can, if uncontrolled, easily perpetuate or expand their power by tricking the intellectually inferior power of the lower classes into surrendering their power for the illusion of guaranteed rights, i.e., ideology. Rousseau argues that before the formation of a social contract, both the poor and the rich are trapped in a perpetual “state of war,” in which “both the poor man and the rich man hope to flee from wealth, hating what they once had prayed for” (R, 438). Thus, it is on the “brink of ruin,” that “the rich, pressed by necessity, finally conceived of the most thought-out project that ever entered the human mind … to use in his favor the very strength of those who attacked him, to turn his adversaries into his defenders, to instill in them other maxims, and to give them other institutions which were as favorable to him as natural right was unfavorable to him” (R, 439). This reveals the “phoniness” of the rich, showing how they successfully schemed to inspire all the lower classes to “[run] and chain themselves, in the belief that they secured their liberty, for although they had enough sense to realize the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers” (439). Although they speak of different “alienations,” Marx and Rousseau agree that the class in power facilitates an ideology or social agreement between the classes to legitimize and further the scope of its authority.
Rousseau further states the case for an evil and “phoniness” much beyond mere material abundance in the rich in stating that the rich “prize the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them; and because, without changing their position, they would cease to be happy, if the people ceased to be miserable” (R, 446). From this, it could be argued that those with unregulated material abundance inevitably develop this desire and hunger for the misery of others. This effect of materialistic corruption is one that Marx notes as well, describing its eventual stages: “In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of interaction are achieved which under the existing relationships cause nothing but mischief and are no longer productive forces but rather destructive ones” (M, 812).
Due to their views of the inevitable corruption of the rich, both would clearly oppose conservative and liberal philosophies which allow an upper or ruling class to engage in unregulated activity which ultimately leads to forming a Social Contract or crafting ideologies to justify and maintain social and political inequalities. Rousseau makes the case for establishing a “good” social contract in which the problem of “phony” leadership and authority vanishes and is replaced by the collective, or “general will” (R, 470).
In Rousseau’s argument for what a truly just social contract should entail, he clearly states that affluence is not an evil, but rather uncontrolled lust for power: “What man loses through the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him and that he can acquire. What he gains is civil liberty and the proprietary ownership of all he possesses” (R, 473). The “unlimited right” and “temptation” he speaks of is what leads a ruling power to lie about the reasons behind its activity in order to satisfy its lust.
Marx, however, envisions a different resulting political establishment to eliminate usurpations of power from the ruling elite. As the “phony” rich further expand their ideological order, from the lower working class, “which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages,” there grows a “consciousness of the necessity of fundamental revolution [and] communist consciousness” (M, 812). In addition, as the rich impose their ideology on the lower classes, there emerges a second type of alienation, one in which the “interests’ of the owners [i.e., the ruling capitalists] of the means of production become alienated from collective interests” (M, 822). Both alienations give rise to contradictions which by necessity can be resolved only through a far-reaching revolution, one which will be instigated by the working class, as it is most fully alienated (M, 814, 823-4). Such a revolution would establish a socialist society, in which the government would strip ownership of the means of material production from the capitalists and create a “communist regulation of production” (M, 810). Thus, with communist control of the material society, communist control would thereby assume the “intellectual power” of the society (M, 814). With all of society capable of the communist creation of “intellectual power,” there would be no equivalent of the ideologies of the former ruling class being imposed upon the lower classes for the purpose of legitimizing usurpations of power.
Marx and Rousseau would agree that mere superior material possession is not in and of itself what leads to the disparity of society, but rather the “phoniness” – the corruption and deceit that follows from it. In their attempts to maintain their superiority, they legitimize social and political inequalities by imposing carefully crafted ideologies and social compacts on the lower classes, contributing to an “alienation” of man. Due to their differing views of what exactly the alienation is, they argue for the creation of different societies to eliminate the “phoniness” of the ruling power.
