In the shadow of 1848 the next great battle between Aristotle and Plato was about to begin anew. “There is a specter haunting Europe,” the Communist Manifesto began, “the specter of Communism.” In truth it was the specter of Book VIII of Plato’s Republic. Those pages first spawned the idea of history as class struggle, a perpetual battle that Aristotle and his many followers over the centuries had sought to defuse but which Marx now yearned for—because, he dared to believe, it would create a new community more radiant and perfect than anything dreamed of by the Romantics or Plato and his
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