In re-interpreting the revolutionary role of classes and questioning the Marxist focus on the proletariat, Pol Pot embraced the idea of a revolutionary alliance between the peasantry and the intellectuals, an idea that Short linked to his reading of Peter Kropotkin while he was in Paris. Contrary to the principles of historical dialectics, he believed that peasants could develop a proletarian consciousness as an effect of the communist party's education of the masses, which resembles orthodox Marxist–Leninist thought. In addition to that, Philip Short maintained that "the grammar of Theravada Buddhism permeated" Pol Pot's thought as much as Confucianism had influenced the development of Maoism in China.