A Karl Marx quotation on past traditions in works on Latin America and Petrarch

"The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. The revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and as the Roman Empire... The heroes, like the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time, the unchaining of bourgeois society and its modern establishment, in Roman costume and with Roman phrases."

Strange as it may seem, I came across this quotation from Karl Marx (Marx K., Engels F. Works, 2nd ed. Vol. 8. pp. 119–120) not only in volume 1 of the academic history of Latin America, but also in the biography of Francesco Petrarch issued by the same publishing house for the 600th anniversary of the poet's birth.

In the history of Latin America, Marx's remark is meant to describe the Inca movement of social protest against Spanish colonialism, in particular the largest liberation movement of three centuries, in Peru, led by the Amerindian aristocrat Túpac Amaru, who appealed to the still-remembered traditions and history of the great Inca state.

In the biography of Petrarch, by contrast, the same words describe how man came to stand at the centre of the new humanist worldview and proved the equal of God, making the attitude to man as a divine being the chief problem of the age. As for European antiquity, it gave form to this new man and placed the discovery within the space of the history of culture, art, literature and the humanities.

All in all, it really is a good quotation. I make you a present of it; perhaps it will serve someone else too.

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