The sycophant — who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy — was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The sycophant — who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy — was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois." in the context of "Karl Marx, in a footnote of Capital : The Process of Capitalist Production (1867), as translated from the 3d German edition, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and edited by Frederick Engels, revised and amplified according to the 4th German edition by Ernest Untermann (1920 edition), p. 834" to mean that wisdom is timeless.