and showed in the boldest terms how theory becomes an
instrument of practice. You may take him as a symbol of the political
theorist. You may say that all the thinkers of influence have been
writing advice to the Prince. Machiavelli recognized Lorenzo the
Magnificent; Marx, the proletariat of Europe.

At first this sounds like standing the world on its head, denying reason
and morality, and exalting practice over righteousness. That is neither
here nor there. I am simply trying to point out an illuminating fact
whose essential truth can hardly be disputed. The important social
philosophies are consciously or otherwise the servants of men's purposes.
Good or bad, that it seems to me is the way we work. We find reasons for
what we want to do. The big men from Machiavelli through Rousseau to Karl
Marx brought history, logic, science and philosophy to prop up and
strengthen their deepest desires. The followers, the epigones, may accept
the reasons of Rousseau and Marx and deduce rules of action from them.
But the original genius sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons
afterward. This amounts to saying that man when he is most creative is
not a rational, but a wilful animal.

The political thinker who to-day exercises the greatest influence on the
Western World is, I suppose, Karl Marx. The socialist movement calls him
its prophet, and, while many socialists say he is superseded, no one
disputes his historical importance. Now Marx embalmed his thinking in the
language of the Hegelian school. He founded it on a general philosophy of
society which is known as the materialistic conception of history.
Moreover, Marx put forth the claim that he had made socialism
"scientific"--had shown that it was woven into the texture of natural
phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia crowds three heavy volumes, so
elaborate and difficult that socialists rarely read them. I have known
one socialist who lived leisurely on his country estate and claimed to
have "looked" at every page of Marx. Most socialists, including the
leaders, study selected passages and let it go at that. This is a wise
economy based on a good instinct. For all the parade of learning and
dialectic is an after-thought--an accident from the fact that the
prophetic genius of Marx appeared in Germany under the incubus of Hegel.
Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he wrote three volumes to
justify it. Did not the Communist Manifesto appear many years before "Das
Kapi