Emancipation

Emancipation is any of various efforts to procuring economic and social rights, political rights or equality, often for a specifically disenfranchised group, or more generally in discussion of such matters. Emancipation stems from ēx manus capere ('detach from the hand'). Among others, Karl Marx discussed political emancipation in his 1844 essay "On the Jewish Question", although often in addition to (or in contrast with) the term human emancipation. Marx's views of political emancipation in this work were summarized by one writer as entailing "equal status of individual citizens in relation to the state, equality before the law, regardless of religion, property, or other “private” characteristics of individual people."^[1]

"Political emancipation" as a phrase is less common in modern usage, especially outside academic, foreign or activist contexts. However, similar concepts may be referred to by other terms. For instance, in the United States the Civil Rights Movement culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 can be seen as further realization of events such as the Emancipation Proclamation and abolition of slavery a century earlier. In the current and former British West Indies islands the holiday Emancipation Day is celebrated to mark the end of the Atlantic slave trade.

See also

• Freedom (political)
• Emancipation of women, including the women's suffrage movement
• Catholic emancipation
• Jewish emancipation
• Emancipation of minors, where a minor becomes an adult in practice, usually by receiving a declaration of liberation from a court expressly for this purpose
• Youth rights
• Dunmore's Proclamation, a British promise during the American Revolutionary War to free slaves who joined the British forces
• Abolitionism of slavery, a political movement that sought to end the practice of slavery and the worldwide slave trade
• Emancipation Proclamation, a declaration by United States President Abraham Lincoln announcing that all slaves in Confederate territory still in rebellion were freed
• Manumission, the freedom of a slave by the owner voluntarily
• Emancipation reform of 1861 in Russia, the liquidation of serfdom for Russian peasants by Alexander II of Russia
• Tanzimat, the gradual emancipation of non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century
• Emancipist was a term used for former transported convicts in the Australian penal colonies given conditional or absolute pardon
• Self-determination
• Revolution (disambiguation)
• Liberation (disambiguation)

References

1. Notes on Political and Human Emancipation, Mark Rupert, Syracuse University.

Further reading

• Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik Karl Marx as a Philosopher of Human Emancipation, translated by Dylan C. Stewart

External links

• The dictionary definition of emancipation at Wiktionary
•  "Emancipation". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.