Marx on Don Quixote

Don Quixote was one of Karl Marx’s favorite books. Marx believed that the important lesson that Quixote had to learn was that not every social order is compatible with knight errantry. Knight errantry is certainly incompatible with the bourgeois order in which Marx saw the last vestiges of chivalry being ridiculed and shunned. In Capital, Marx writes: “This much, however, is clear, that the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and their Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society.”