Despite Marx’s hyperphilosophic hyperpolemical style, there is a grandeur, a wit, and a poignancy to his view of history. “Christian Socialism,” he says, “is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart burnings of the aristocrat.” By his ways of asking he awakens us to ignorance that we had never recognized. He thought he was definitively mapping the whole human past. He was really a discoverer of terra incognita, only a Columbus, whose followers liked to think of him as a Vespucci.
