The Communist Manifesto rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy [sic!] of rural life". As Eric Hobsbawm noted, however: Marx and Engels’ political influences were wide-ranging, reacting to and taking inspiration from German idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English and Scottish political economy. "The Communist Manifesto" also takes influence from literature. In Jacques Derrida’s work, "Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International", he uses Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" to frame a discussion of the history of the International, showing, in the process, the influence that Shakespeare’s work had on Marx and Engel’s writing.
The Communist Manifesto of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself". The first section of the "Manifesto", "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or "proletariat", engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the "bourgeoisie". As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending