Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill have both done a great deal to shape modern political philosophy. Their differences stand out fairly easily: Mill the analytical English-language utilitarian enthusiast of capitalist progress, Marx the “continental” dialectical advocate of communist revolution. Yet what stands out to me is what they have in common.

Maybe their commonalities stand out to me because they’re the first two philosophers I ever seriously engaged with myself, back in high school. As I sought a deeper justification for my own activist political views, Mill’s Utilitarianism was the first primary philosophical text I ever read. And my father’s Marxism spurred me to do a paper on Marxism in a high-school economics class, for a teacher who was somewhat bewildered by it. Possibly as a result, both thinkers have shaped my own political philosophy considerably – though I have my disagreements with both. But in both my agreements and disagreements, I find their similarities more important than their differences.