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 were Spanish editions in Latin America. This uneven geographical spread in the "Manifesto"s popularity reflected the development of socialist movements in a particular region as well as the popularity of Marxist variety of socialism there. There was not always a strong correlation between a social-democratic party's strength and the "Manifesto"s popularity in that country. For instance, the German SPD printed only a few thousand copies of the "Communist Manifesto" every year, but a few hundred thousand copies of the "Erfurt Programme". Further, the mass-based social-democratic parties of the Second International did not require their rank and file to be well-versed