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.[418] 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.[419] 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.[418]