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 ('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."