Many environmentalist critics of Marx raise his contemptuous dismissal of the countryside and the peasantry by his use of the phrase “the idiocy of rural life”. Hal Draper in The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto gave a different translation of its use in the Communist Manifesto. In Draper’s translation the phrase “the idiocy of rural life” is replaced with “the isolation of rural life.” His explanation for this correction is worth quoting:
"The German word Idiotismus did not, and does not, mean “idiocy” (Idiotie); it usually means idiom, like its French cognate idiotisme. But here in The Communist Manifesto it means neither. In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community. What the rural population had to be saved from, then, was the privatized apartness of a life-style isolated from the larger society."
The paragraph is now more accurately read as:
"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the isolation of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."
Engels in his Condition of the Working Class in England he had written about the rural weavers as a class “which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind.” In 1873 he made exactly the Manifesto’s point without using the word “idiocy”: the abolition of the town-country antithesis “will be able to deliver the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years” (Housing Question)
"The German word Idiotismus did not, and does not, mean “idiocy” (Idiotie); it usually means idiom, like its French cognate idiotisme. But here in The Communist Manifesto it means neither. In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community. What the rural population had to be saved from, then, was the privatized apartness of a life-style isolated from the larger society."
The paragraph is now more accurately read as:
"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the isolation of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."
Engels in his Condition of the Working Class in England he had written about the rural weavers as a class “which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind.” In 1873 he made exactly the Manifesto’s point without using the word “idiocy”: the abolition of the town-country antithesis “will be able to deliver the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years” (Housing Question)
Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West." kviklån 18 år. lendinu.dk
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