Britons Make Their Marx

BBC Radio is running a poll to name the nation's favorite philosopher. Karl Marx is leading. Opinion writer Michael Gove has some thoughts about that:

The author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital may be the godfather of more misery, death and criminality than any other figure from the last 200 years. But he speaks, across the decades, and over a mountain of corpses, to an eternal yearning on the part of intellectuals. Marxism appeals to the thwarted dignity of the intellectual, flattering the academically inclined by playing to their sense that the world does not value them as it should.

Indeed.

Update: Lee at Right Thinking has more in depth thoughts on this subject.