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Marx criticises the negative liberal conception of freedom as a liberty limited by that of others and of the state as a separate sphere which both assures the convergence of wills and enforces the law of property. There is a tension between Marx's emphasis on political emancipation which is contradicted by the bourgeois civil order and his argument that the suppression of the bourgeois civil order entails the abolition of a political sphere. S.P., combining the marxian critique and the liberal legacy, argues for the primacy of the political.