The powerless shall indeed inherit the earth, because, as Hegel taught, each stage of history produces its antithesis, and thus its ultimate doom. The ancient world had produced the slaves, Jews, and cultural outcasts who became the backbone of Christianity and thus destroyed the Roman Empire. The Middle Ages produced the bourgeois merchant class, on whose money kings and barons and the Church became totally dependent even though they treated it with contempt. Here—however briefly—Marx’s vision of history overlaps with William Robertson’s, and Adam Smith’s.
