To exhort is to emphatically urge someone to do something. After all, who exactly would he cite as an expert on communism? He's the expert, right? Exhortative It's not like Karl footnotes every sentence to a bibliography in the back of the book he says it, gives his own reasons for it, and he wants to be the final authority on the subject. Pretty much everything in the Communist Manifesto is declaimed rather than stated. Setting aside the brain-flip Karl's performing by calling the bourgeoisie revolutionary (his point is that they once replaced the feudal aristocracy), notice how he's just straight-up stating some fact about the bourgeoisie and giving it an emotional touch by saying most revolutionary. Take this sentence: "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part" (Section1.13).
To declaim something is to state it loudly, usually with an appeal to the emotions. If every sentence is qualified with a million maybes, then readers are going to get bored instead of reaching for their pitchforks. Yeah, that kind of attention to detail might have strengthened Karl's argument, but with an uprising about to start in France and elsewhere, he didn't have time for that or an interest in it. Yo, Karl- all existing society up to then? It's not like the dude says, "Well, the history of most existing society is more or less the history of class struggles, to some extent, except there was that time in northern Russia where this isolated tribe of hunter-gatherers…." To take another example of hyperbole, consider Marx's famous line "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Section1.1). But if you're reading a manifesto someone has just handed you in 1848 while you're sweating after leaving your miserable factory job, and you don't have an Internet to fact-check with, then you might just read that sentence and be like, "Hey, I'm gonna be on this team!" Um, yeah-historically, that's totally a lie. He often exaggerates his side of the argument, especially to make it sound like he's winning or knows exactly what he's talking about.įor example, he says, "Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself a Power" (Beginning.3).
"Hyperbolic" is a fancy adjective that just means exaggerating. Here are just a few of the tricks up his communist sleeve. After all, the whole point of this manifesto is to incite millions of workers to overthrow the rich, and it's a lot easier to do that if you can woo them with some fabulous turns of phrase.
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