OR, TO PARAPHRASE THE OLD TRUISM...:

To begin, it is worth considering the work of historian David Starkey, who argues that the essential class distinction is not the one Marx drew, of proletarians and their bourgeois oppressors. Instead, it is between manual workers, whose trade is material, and the professions, whose work is knowledge--and it dates back to antiquity. This was the key dividing line in Roman society, differentiating slaves from citizens. The slaves did the manual labour (craftsmen, porters, servants), while the liberal (i.e., free) arts of the professions (statecraft, oratory, literature) were reserved for free men. The same distinction between the learned literate and the masses can be traced all the way through ecclesiastical Christianity to the modern professions of law, medicine, and academia, all of whose structures are based on that of the medieval clergy. On this model, credentialled, learned authorities profess revealed knowledge to the untrained layman. Today, these secular clergy are reverentially known as "experts". But it is in the nature of these professions, which, being based on ideas, always begin at least one step removed from material reality, to get carried away with their own dogmas. This is especially true where there is no worldly authority against which to verify their claims. If an architect or engineer is a fraud, his buildings are likely to fail. In academic peer review, only the initiated have the credentials required to judge.

That class is a function more of outlook than income was clear to Orwell, as he explains in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, which depicts both the privations of working-class life and the British class system as a whole.

Orwell describes how the "lower-upper-middle-class" (Orwell's own), generally professionals in the "Army, Navy, Church, Medicine [or] Law", understood and aspired to all the many customs of the upper classes (hunting, servants, how to order dinner correctly) despite never being able to afford them. Thus, "To belong to this class when you were [only] at the £400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical." This same dynamic applies today (though the bourgeois values aspired to now are quite different): a poor librarian is far less likely than a wealthy plumber to have voted for causes like Brexit or Trump, which are both populist and, thus, lower-class.

Themselves men of letters, both Orwell and Dalrymple understand that this class distinction is frequently signalled through language. "As for the technical jargon of the Communists," writes Orwell, "it is as far removed from the common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook." Such contorted academic prose means little to the ordinary worker, for whom, Orwell argues, Socialism simply means "justice and common decency." Indeed, Orwell laments that "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents" because of their distance from everyday concerns and inability to speak plainly. Summarising the problem, he quips: "The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight."

A lifelong socialist, Orwell was repeatedly frustrated by the symptoms of this intellectual snobbery--why do the revolutionaries have such disdain for the ordinary punter? Dalrymple, meanwhile, in his essay "How--and How Not--to Love Mankind," takes aim at its roots. Here, Dalrymple compares the life and work of Marx to his now lesser-known contemporary, Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev. Though their lives closely resembled one another's, Dalrymple argues, "They nevertheless came to view human life and suffering in very different, indeed irreconcilable, ways--through different ends of the telescope, as it were. Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses. Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances."

The problem, for Dalrymple, is abstraction. As Kant understood in his Critique of Pure Reason, theory alone, unchecked by experience, is always liable to overextend itself. This intellectual narcissism is portrayed archetypally in literature by Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost. Cast out of Heaven and bent on revenge, he declares bitterly: "The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

Thus, preferring his mind's eye to reality, the idealist intellectual creates glittering cathedrals in the sky; it is only when construction begins that problems start to arise. Marx's mechanical theory of society reduces real individuals, with their hopes and fears, beliefs and desires, to mere abstract "classes". He subordinates reality--messy, limited, and all too human--to a perfect model in which utopia is the only possible outcome. As Dalrymple puts it: "Marx's eschatology, lacking all common sense, all knowledge of human nature, rested on abstractions that were to him more real than the actual people around him."

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