Some 172 years ago Karl Marx opened the modern era of politics in proclaiming that a spectre was haunting Europe. The spectre he referred to was in the title of his “Communist Manifesto”. 

Marx was talking in the context of the series of political disturbances in major European capital cities in 1848.  He interpreted these as bookending the ancien regime, the evolution from which had been brutally signalled in 1789 with the French Revolution and perhaps even back in 1649 when Charles I paid the price for his “high crimes and misdemeanors”.