Through his study of the utopian socialists, and especially of Proudhon, the problem of the perversion of the social community by private property became quite clear to Marx: if private property – and the split between private interest and general interest originating from it – it is not a necessary development, but an incidental one, it can be subsumed. This article aims to demonstrate how, in search of a Rousseauian republicanism and a critique of bourgeois liberalism, Karl Marx flirted with the communists’ critique of private property. We discuss Proudhon’s critique of private property and five articles Mark wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung: the article against the Kantian Hermes, the controversy with the socialist Moses Hess, the reply ...