Historical Research on Rights in the Eyes of Young Marx

Karl Marx’s insightful critique of bourgeois rights,represented in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen adopted by France,can be attributed to the short-term and longterm perspectives he adopted successively in his research.By reading works such as History of France in the Revolutionary Era and History of the French Revolutionary Parliament,Marx was able to examine the original intentions of the legislators in the period of the French Revolution.This short-term examination was the most intuitive and logical approach to studying the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,in which Marx focused on the research of the period of the French National Convention and its idea on property rights.The enigmatic political-legal facts that emerged in 1793 during the French Revolution,along with other incidents,presented an opportunity for Marx to turn to long-term rights surveys.In this context,Marx gradually shifted his attention from the legislators who were the shining protagonists of the“grand political historical drama”to the underlying forces that worked behind them,and in doing so understood how the two major achievements of the French Revolution provided an explanation for the historicity of the phenomenon of rights.Marx’s longterm rights surveys from the perspective of historical materialism were directly inspired by the Kreuznach Notes as well as famous scholars including Francois Guizot,Augustin Thierry,and Henri Saint-Simon.