Giuseppe Mazzini: An Essay on the Duties of Man: Addressed to Workingmen

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Nineteenth-century progressive and revolutionary philosophers such as Karl Marx addressed the working classes with the language of social science to blanket with objectivity their explanation of the oppression of the working classes. From the beginning of An Essay on the Duties of Man, it is immediately clear that Mazzini’s tone is more influenced by emotion and religion. In what a modern reader may judge as a paternalistic and even condescending first two paragraphs, Mazzini uses such terms and expressions as “holiest things,” “God,” speaking and listening “in love,” “heart,” “fraternally,” “apostle of truth,” and “Heaven.” This rhetoric is grounded in a faith in the brotherhood of men that cuts through class lines. To the celebration of individual liberty and rights, Mazzini opposes a “common bond” among humankind. In this respect, Duties of Man enters in a close confrontation with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

Mazzini starts his argument with a paradox. In a world that oppresses the working classes, he talks to them not about their rights but about their duties. He contends that the pursuit of material well-being, which—rather than moral improvement and education—has been at the center of the workingmen’s political agenda, has not benefited their cause. On the contrary, in most countries the condition of the working class “has even deteriorated,” and while poverty rises, public and charitable institutions are unable to take an effective course to address this problem. The rising levels of poverty contrast with the increase in the sources of social wealth, which has become concentrated more and more in the hands of a limited number of people. A new form of aristocracy has arisen, sanctioned not by birth but by material wealth. Giving rights to the people amounts to nothing if they are not also provided with the intellectual and economic means to exercise these rights. Economic resources should be provided through education, expanded access to the means of production, and financial credit.

Although Mazzini is not denying individual rights, he makes the case for a change in perspective where the conviction that men “are all sons of one sole God” leads them to see the fight against social injustice and the pursuit of virtue as a duty. As Mazzini specifically addresses his oeuvre to the working classes, he seems to be arguing that it is wrong for them to put their class interests before their duties as human beings and their spiritual needs. Taking this path would be just as wrong as solely pursuing the interests of the bourgeoisie and capital. To Mazzini, duties and rights are inseparable, just as the single classes are indissoluble parts of the larger society.

The text also stresses that education, in its extended meaning as moral training rather than just instruction, is more important than material advancement for the working classes. Education will help men establish “an order of things . . . superior to that now existing” and act to keep it. Only through education is it possible to challenge oppression effectively and lastingly. In the final part of the text, Mazzini returns to the language of religion to argue that education will make people aware that focusing on material interests alone produces divisions and clashes within the oppressed and not just between them and their oppressors. Education will induce men across social classes to “associate together, . . . to fraternize . . . to create such a social organization as shall put an end” to the sufferings of the workers and the fears of the wealthier classes to be violently overthrown by the majority. Mazzini claims that the establishment of this brotherhood of men is “the mission which God has given to his human creature here on earth.” Securing solidarity among all the different social components is the God-given mission of workers, who can find inspiration in the message and the actions of Christ.