WHILST those on the Right are quick to blame ‘Marxists’ for the prevailing tendency to attack the family unit and undermine the sanctity of private property, the roots of this tendency are far older than the political theory which is ordinarily associated with the mid-nineteenth century. It is Plato’s Republic (375 BCE) which is chiefly responsible for the proliferation of such ideas, claiming that the removal of a child from the family environment and the abolition of private property would lead to an ‘ideal state’. Even the Guardian newspaper, that nauseating bastion of contemporary liberal-leftism, is named after the hypothetical philosopher-kings who rule over the inhabitants of Plato’s dystopian realm.

The clue to identifying this historical thread lies in the large number of modern-day Hegelians who act as professional gatekeepers in the Facebook philosophy groups. If they are not consistently transforming each and every thread into an opportunistic discussion about Hegel himself, they are using Slavoj Žižek as a fashionable smokescreen and yet – as I have explained – this is a very ancient tendency that many other German Idealists such as Friedrich Schelling would have opposed. It is no accident, for example, that Friedrich Engels produced his spiteful Anti-Schelling (1842) as a means of clearing the path for a materialistic incarnation of Hegel to act as the sole voice of German Idealism and thus consign the Romantic philosophy that resisted the worst excesses of the Enlightenment to the historical memory-hole.

Plato wasn’t all bad, not by any stretch of the imagination, but the Marxists and Fabians have merely appropriated the worst of his ideas and poured vintage Greek wine into sour-tasting bottles. The dribbling leftist who rants at family and property, therefore, is a regurgitated Platonist who relies on the public’s lack of philosophical understanding. Intellectuals, on the other hand, should know better than to give so much credit to the relative newcomers of state socialism. We’ve had almost 2,400 years to see it coming, after all.