When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
smarties — Sunday, 15 April 2007
by Donald W. Taylor II
With Paris surrounded and besieged by the Prussian army and the provisional government struggling to maintain support, Friedrich Engels wrote to Karl Marx of the chaos in the city:
From these perpetual little panics of the French ... one gets a much better idea of the Reign of Terror. We think of it as the reign of people who instill terror. But quite the contrary, it is the reign of people who are themselves terrified. La Terreur is for the most part useless cruelties perpetuated by people who are themselves frightened, for the purpose of reassuring themselves. I am convinced that the blame for the Reign of Terror, Anno 1793, falls almost entirely on the over-nervous bourgeois acing the patriot, on the little, philistine petit-bourgeois soiling his pants in fright and on the riff-raff mob, making a business out of the terror.
Letter, Engels to Marx, 4 September 1870, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, III/4, p. 377, quoted in Wolfe, Bertram D., Marxism: 100 Years in the Life of a Doctrine, New York: Dial Press, 1965, p. 166.
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Donald W. Taylor II Washington, D.C. United States of America taylordw@goodleaf.net |