The Communist Manifesto 1848) in Ghent to establish a branch of the Democratic Association there. Subsequently, having not heard from Marx for nearly two months, the Central Committee of the Communist League sent him an ultimatum on 24 or 26 January, demanding he submit the completed manuscript by 1 February. This imposition spurred Marx on, who struggled to work without a deadline, and he seems to have rushed to finish the job in time. (For evidence of this, historian Eric Hobsbawm points to the absence of rough drafts, only one page of which survives.) In all, the "Manifesto" was written over 6–7 weeks.
The Communist Manifesto entered political-science syllabuses in universities, which would only expand after the Second World War. For its centenary in 1948, its publication was no longer the exclusive domain of Marxists and academicians; general publishers too printed the "Manifesto" in large numbers. "In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist document," Hobsbawm noted, "it had become a political classic "tout court"." Even after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, the "Communist Manifesto" remains ubiquitous; Hobsbawm says that "In states without censorship, almost certainly anyone within reach of a good bookshop, and certainly anyone within reach of a