Then there is Karl Marx: what is one to say of this undoubtedly clever, but unattractive, self-obsessed tyrant? Certainly not that he loved his life’s professed project, the improvement of the lot of the proletariat. He described the peasants as ‘troglodytes’,18 the workers as ‘those asses’, ‘the rabble’, ‘the mob’: and his acolyte Engels wrote to him, clearly anticipating approval, that ‘the people are of no importance whatever’.
