Mary Wollstonecraft and Karl Marx

Paper Summary:

Both Mary Wollstonecraft and Karl Marx developed ideas about the way society is formed and the way it should be formed and both did so in economic and social terms. The paper shows that there are considerable differences between the views they take on these topics. Each wanted to change society and each examined the nature of their society and determined what sorts of developments should be taken in the future. The paper examines Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792) and Karl Marx's class theory.

From the Paper:

"Marx and Engels do not speak of individuals as a rule but rather of classes, mass grouping of people according to economic and social position. In the perspective of Marx and Engels, the bourgeois society in which they lived was a system of class conflict and the domination of the bourgeois class over the proletarian class. They described the nature of this society not as an aberration but as a stage in social evolution, succeeding the feudal period and preceding the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This view was based on the idea that these stages were inevitable and that the only way for the proletariat to gain a better position in life was through revolution, through the violent overthrow of bourgeois society."

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