There’s an ironic facet of this, which has rated too little comment. Marx himself, if you don’t count his irresponsibilities concerning debt, got through life largely through subsisting on voluntary charity, as did Engels. This meant that his own system, during its formative stages, was not subject to the common-sense critique which temporarily demolished the Industriel school, that he was just creating a squawk so as to get his own boys on the government payroll. Since many people size up the writing through the life of the writer, this facet might very well have had more influence on the spread of Marxism than is generally realized.

Just imagine how this point, if deployed skillfully in debate, would confound a “bourgeois”:

“The great Marx lived at heart according to your way, and yet he concluded that all private property should be abolished for the good of humanity. Your heroes concluded that private property is progressive, and yet they have, almost to a man, snapped up ‘reactionary’, ‘parasitic’ government jobs as quickly as they’ve been offered them….”

Thankfully, the intellectual progress of humanity has not ‘advanced’ to the point where the doctrine of polylogism – a rhetorical stratagem used to fend off the point that all defenses of socialism of this sort rely upon argumentae ad hominae – has prevailed. The mind still speaks.

That should be a page turner.

Doherty is working on a book about the history of radical American libertarianism.

In an effort to make this relevant, I highly suggest this article and/or the lecture given by Professor Raico on the same topic, available in the media section. Incredibly informative intellectual ammunition. And the prose is a delight as well.