This was precisely the kind of socialism Karl Marx most detested. By the same token, Marx’s version was the one that Mill most feared. He watched the founding of the first Communist International, spoke to some of the English delegates who attended, and did not like what he heard. Marx, like Hegel, believed crisis and revolution were history’s path to freedom. Mill believed history showed they were the path to slavery. The idea of the proletariat seizing the means of production was “obviously chimerical,” he wrote, and would only plunge humanity into the brutal state of nature envisaged by
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