From Individual Rights to Human Emancipation: Marx's Transcendence of the Liberal Theory of Political Emancipation

The liberal theory of political emancipation regards protecting individual rights as the primary purpose of the state, but instead of achieving this goal, the Western world today guided by this theory is mired in social division. When the state protects special elements of civil society as individual rights, it connives at the powerful influence of private property, which on the one hand makes the equal citizen participation promised by the state abstract and false, and on the other hand allows the private sphere of civil society to become a battlefield of hostility between individuals. Marx's theory of "human emancipation" transcends the logic of political emancipation. He proposed that in order to truly achieve human emancipation，the material basis of civil society must be changed, the antagonistic relationship between people brought about by economic inequality must be eliminated, and the unity of individual life and "species-life" must be restored.