Top Highlights

• It reveals Shelley as astonishingly single-minded in the pursuit of his ideals but ruthless and even brutal in disposing of anyone who got in the way. Like Rousseau, he loved humanity in general but was often cruel to human beings in particular. He burned with a fierce love but it was an abstract flame and the poor mortals who came near it were oft...
• Marx, then, led a scholar’s life. He once complained: ‘I am a machine condemned to devour books.’3 But in a deeper sense he was not really a scholar and not a scientist at all. He was not interested in finding the truth but in proclaiming it. There were three strands in Marx: the poet, the journalist and the moralist.
• and that enlightened man, through his own unaided intellect, had the moral right and duty to reconstruct it
• their personal notions of freedom have moral precedence over the requirements of society.
• With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs.