When intellectuals have their sway.....................Or, be careful what you wish for..................

The guiding notion of the Enlightenment, and later of Marx and Lenin's 'scientific' socialism, was that henceforth the alliance of happiness and justice would no longer come about through the individual quest for wisdom, but through the rebuilding of society as a whole.  And before building a new society, the old one first had to be completely destroyed.  It was at the end of the eighteenth century that the idea of revolution took on its modern meaning.  Personal salvation was from then on subordinate to collective salvation.
-Jean-Francois Revel, as excerpted from here