ABSTRACT
The ideologists of the proletariat are bourgeois intellectuals. The bourgeoisie, whether it derived its ideas from Montesquieu, Voltaire or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, set up its own conception of human existence and the political order in opposition to the Ancien Regime and the Catholic vision of the world. Soft-hearted intellectuals, revolted by injustice, seized on the idea that capitalism, being in itself evil, would be destroyed by its contradictions and that its victims would eventually overthrow the privileged. The revolutions of the twentieth century have not been proletarian revolutions; they have been thought up and carried out by intellectuals. Prisoners of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, the intellectuals of the East are not allowed to admit the obvious fact that industrial civilisation comprises a multiplicity of forms between which neither history nor reason imposes a radical choice. An intellectual class, trained in political debate, aspired to exercise power.
