ABSTRACT
The first romantic socialists to make important theoretical contributions were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to them, “social history” is a record of past struggles between the bourgeoisie, or those who had land, resources, factories, and other means of production, and the proletariat, who worked for wages and had little. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, together with his companion Simone de Beauvoir, can be considered two of the romantic supporters of totalitarianism. Perhaps “romantics” might not be the most appropriate label, because these individuals are always driven, similarly to totalitarian dictators, by unconscious childhood needs relating to ambivalence about authority figures, problems of sexual identity, sometimes in the form of latent homosexuality, where the concern for the suffering people, if any, is secondary. Marx was such an honest person and a product of 1800s “Romanticism” that, unlike many other philosophers, he lived precisely as he preached: he and his family lived on the charity of friends and died in absolute poverty.
