Robert Manne: Longing for equality undermined a political thinker without equal: "Because of Nazism, my politics were of the left. It was Orwell who complicated my political identity. It was he who explained most straightforwardly the implications of the Stalinist catastrophe. A passage from a letter he wrote in 1939 transformed my political outlook: 'The thing that frightens me about the modern intelligentsia is their inability to see that human society must be based on human decency ... There is something wrong with a regime that needs a pyramid of corpses every few years.'"

My vote for greatest political writer of the 20th Century would go to Chomsky.

Robert Manne: Longing for equality undermined a political thinker without equal: "Because of Nazism, my politics were of the left. It was Orwell who complicated my political identity. It was he who explained most straightforwardly the implications of the Stalinist catastrophe. A passage from a letter he wrote in 1939 transformed my political outlook: 'The thing that frightens me about the modern intelligentsia is their inability to see that human society must be based on human decency ... There is something wrong with a regime that needs a pyramid of corpses every few years.'"

My vote for greatest political writer of the 20th Century would go to Chomsky.