ABSTRACT
The proletariat is, of course, a peculiarly vulnerable ideological concept, and may be easily recognized as a fantasy composed by intellectuals ambitious to play a role in politics. Mostly, ideologies such as nationalism or racialism have little claim to be taken seriously in academic terms, but in Marxism we have a case of something that stands four-square as claiming intellectual equality with, indeed superiority to, what is otherwise taught in universities. Marx belonged to an ideological class of men whom E. H. Carr has called 'the romantic exiles', and both of Carr's words capture important features of their situation. Academically speaking they are feeble, though this feebleness is sometimes obscured by the ideological disposition towards abusive labelling as a substitute for thought. Ideological writing reduces this dualistic understanding of human action to a single world of objects to be described.
