Review I. I. on Born Free

This essay Marina Koujman ‘ Born Free’ is less a conventional review of Friedrich Engels’s Anti-D;hring and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract than a reflective engagement with the intellectual legacy of modern political thought. Rather than adopting a posture of academic neutrality, the author places these canonical texts under ethical and historical scrutiny, measuring their claims against lived experience, psychological insight, and the political realities of the present.
The contrast drawn between Engels and Rousseau is particularly illuminating. Anti-D;hring is presented as an example of the theoretical density and polemical inwardness of Marxist discourse—an approach that, while analytically powerful, often marginalizes the concrete human being. Engels’s treatment of militarism, for instance, appears strikingly inadequate in retrospect. His assumption that war, as an economically unproductive activity, would exhaust itself has been decisively refuted by the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essay persuasively suggests that militarism cannot be explained by economic logic alone; it is also rooted in existential anxiety, in the human search for meaning through domination, violence, and power.
Against this background, Rousseau emerges as a thinker of remarkable contemporary relevance. The Social Contract is portrayed as a work in which rational argument is inseparable from moral feeling. Rousseau addresses freedom, authority, and obedience not as abstract categories but as lived conditions. His philosophy offers neither material rewards nor institutional security, and precisely for that reason it poses a serious challenge to entrenched and self-serving forms of power.
One of the essay’s central contributions lies in its focus on governance—not merely as an economic function, but as a problem of human self-rule and political responsibility. The author identifies a persistent blind spot in much social theory: the tendency to replace human will with impersonal forces such as “economic interests” or “class dynamics.” Despite their profound analyses of society, Marx and Engels devoted surprisingly little attention to the psychological and moral dimensions of governing. In this respect, Rousseau appears more attentive to political reality, recognizing that every form of government is vulnerable to decay and must be judged by its capacity to serve the common good.
The prose is lucid and restrained, occasionally sharp but never polemical for its own sake. Biographical reflections—on Marx’s personal hardships, on Tolstoy’s moral transformation—are integrated thoughtfully, reinforcing the essay’s broader claim that philosophy divorced from human experience risks becoming sterile.
Ultimately, the essay does more than juxtapose two influential works. It reopens a fundamental question of political philosophy: what is more essential to a just society—economic calculation or moral feeling, structural theory or the lived reality of human beings? The author clearly aligns with Rousseau’s answer, arguing that The Social Contract remains, in the fullest sense, a guide to action—one whose relevance has not diminished, but intensified, in the modern world.