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.
John Younger (writer) John Younger (writer) John Younger (1785–1860), of St. Boswells, was a Scottish writer on angling, a shoemaker, and poet. Younger, the youngest of the six children of William Younger, a Border shoemaker, by his wife, Jean Henderson. He was born at Longnewton in the parish of Ancrum, Roxburghshire, on 5 July 1785. His grandfather, John Younger, had put by £900 as a gardener in England, but lost it all by an unlucky speculation. He himself was put to the last when barely nine. The countryside was a poor one, even before the black famine of the closing years of the