A frustrated academic with a professor’s incapacity to finish anything properly

From On Marx by Alan Ryan 

If the German government had not sent Lenin across its territory and back to Russia in a sealed train in early 1917, we might today regard Marx as a not very important nineteenth-century philosopher, sociologist, economist, and political theorist. If he had not had the good (or bad) luck to be treated as the source of near-divine wisdom by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we might treat his economics as an interesting offshoot of the Ricardian system, and his historical theories as an interesting variation on themes first sketched by Hegel, Saint-Simon, Guizot, and Comte. Political theorists would complain, as I shall, that his political theory is sketchy and unfinished. They might explain his lurchings between cynicism and utopianism as a reaction to the vagaries of his fellow radicals, or a consequence of the fact that Marx was a frustrated academic with a professor’s incapacity to finish anything properly, a man of many deep insights who was unable to complete any project before being distracted by the next.