Eco on Manifesto.

 

23 Dec 2014.

“It is difficult to imagine that a few fine pages can single-handedly change the world. After all, Dante’s entire oeuvre (the body of work) was not enough to restore a Holy Roman Empire to the Italian city-states. But, in commemorating The Communist Manifesto of 1848, a text that certainly has exercised a major influence on the history of two centuries, I believe one must reread it from the point of view of its literary quality, or at least –even if one does not read it in the original German-of its extraordinary rhetorical skill and the structure of its arguments.”

“Even apart from its genuinely poetic capacity to invent memorable metaphors, the Manifesto remains a masterpiece of political (but not only political) oratory, and it ought to be studied at school along with Cicero’s Invectives against Catiline and Mark Antony’s speech over Julius Caesar’s body in Shakespeare, especially as it is not impossible, given Marx’s familiarity with classical culture, that he had in mind these very texts when writing it.”

--Umberto Eco, on literature (On the Style of the Communist Manifesto)