Sir, Michael Gove (Comment, June 22) deftly excoriates the Radio 4 listeners who have voted for Karl Marx in the search for the nation’s favourite philosopher.
There are bound to be many ways we can judge a philosopher. One way might be how much his thought has contributed to human flourishing.
As Gove rightly demonstrates, Marx’s ideas cannot possibly be considered the greatest, as witnessed by the Soviet labour camps and the Great Leap Forward. Marx is probably the only important philosopher, with the exception of Nietzsche, whose writings implicitly encourage violence and destruction.
Another measure with which to judge Marx is in the accuracy of his predictions — he was, after all, a prolific prophet. Marx scores very lightly. All of his major predictions about the industrialised world have so far proved wrong. The State has not withered away, capitalism has not collapsed, there was no proletarian revolution and there has been no class war.
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But what should not be forgotten is that Marx was a compassionate human being. His main intellectual striving was to build a system of human liberation. His rationalism told him this was possible, but he manipulated history to suit his purpose. Good but not great.
RICHARD WALKER
Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire
From Mr Bernard Shilling
Sir, To blame Karl Marx for the weird antics of some intellectuals and today’s leftist movements must have the old boy turning in his grave.
I cannot accept the view that Marx “may be the godfather of more misery, death and criminality than any other figure from the last 200 years”. In the misery and death stakes, no secular thinker can even run a close second to the god-worshippers of the world’s religions throughout that period, or, indeed, the past 2,000 years.
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BERNARD SHILLING
New Barnet, Hertfordshire