>I don't have the patience right now to look up the exact history of the
term
>*idiot*, but I know it in general. In Greek *idiotes* (sp?) meant
something
>like a private person, a person who did not take part in the collective
>(political) life of the *polis* and was therefore (as we can see from
>Arisotle's use of *political* [I forget the Greek]) "not all there, not
>fully human, incomplete."
My yuppie Verso edition of the Communist Manifesto has an introduction by Eric Hobspawn that talks about Marx's use of the phrase "the idiocy of rural life". He says the sense Marx meant was the isolation, both cultural and political, the peasantry had from the larger society.
Jim Baird
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