Within the larger field of bourgeois ideology, a German tendency could be distinguished from the Anglo-French one. The Hegelian school professed the primacy of the ideals of a people

Later solutions would entail a more radical break with the premises of these earlier histories of civil society, and not just with their mystified Hegelian sublimations

Marx, it must be noted, was not seeking to provide an all-purpose account of human history that would address such complicating objections and qualifications. The meaning of his draft of historical materialism can only be understood in the polemical context of the inversion of historical idealism

eventually, the thorough deracination of the entire Mediterranean world

The relative backwardness of conditions on the continent led liberal and conservative parties to adopt positions on economic policy that were the obverse of the ones held by their counterparts in England

the vast German market was flooded with the output of English factories, conveniently drawing scarce capital into the outlet of public debt, thereby relieving the parlous finances of a government resisting parliamentary control of the budget

Marx’s Ricardian conception of real wages as permanently fixed at near the bare subsistence level ruled out anything but defensive struggles to keep wages from sinking below the subsistence minimum.

Russia, for its part, was the bulwark of a European order resting on the rent and tax exploitation of the peasantry.

England was the dominant, Russia the subordinate hegemon of the world system of bourgeois society.

This is where the significance of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon lies. Its dramatic political and theoretical departure was its relegation of the French Revolution and the whole legacy of Jacobinism to the past.