More than a quarter of listeners asked last year in a Radio 4 poll who they thought was the most important philosopher for today's world replied Karl Marx - he was easily the winner, ahead of Hume, Plato, Karl Popper and others. Asked to comment, Eric Hobsbawm said he thought that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political debris, and barely resembled the quasi-religious icon and prophetic travesty of the 20th century.

LRB 26 January 2006 | PDF Download