A Party Game That Outlived an Empire
In spring 1865, Karl Marx sat down in his uncle Lion Philips’ house in Zaltbommel, Holland, and filled out a questionnaire. It wasn’t a political document. It was a “Confessions” game: a semi-jocular parlour pastime that circulated in Victorian England, essentially a personality quiz passed from hand to hand at social gatherings. His daughters Laura and Jenny had pressed him into it.
His answers have survived. The quality he admired most: simplicity. The vice he hated most: servility. His personal motto: De omnibus dubitandum, Latin for “Doubt everything.”
Reading those three answers now, something feels off-key. They don’t sound like the profile of a revolutionary political economist. They sound like the profile of a scientist.
Four People Who Were Never Asked About Marx
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson directs the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Geobiologist Hope Jahren runs a stable isotope laboratory at the University of Oslo. Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford, received a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Freeman Dyson, who died on February 28, 2020, spent decades as a theoretical physicist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.
None of them were asked about Karl Marx. Yet each of them, in their own writing and interviews, describes what makes science function in terms that map almost exactly onto Marx’s three answers. The overlap is clean enough to feel eerie.
Doubt Everything: What That Looks Like in Practice
Tyson has pointed to cooking as an example of scientific thinking. Tasting, adjusting, tasting again. Testing a hypothesis and revising it based on direct observation. His point is that this habit of personal verification isn’t a credential or a professional skill; it’s a disposition that shows up wherever someone refuses to accept how things are supposed to turn out.
Jahren’s version of the same instinct came earlier. She grew up spending long hours in her father’s high school science lab, handling equipment and running through procedures long before she had the theory to explain what she was doing. Her memoir Lab Girl (2016) traces her entire scientific identity back to that pre-theoretical, hands-on immersion. “Doubt everything” in her case wasn’t a philosophy she adopted. It was a reflex formed in a room full of instruments, before anyone told her what conclusions to reach.
The 50-Cent Microscope
Manu Prakash’s contribution to this portrait is more concrete. He built the Foldscope: a fully functional optical microscope that costs roughly 50 cents in parts, folds out of a flat sheet of paper, weighs less than 0.31 oz (8.8 g), and delivers over 2,000x magnification with sub-micron resolution. It has been used to diagnose malaria and other infectious diseases. Over 2 million have been distributed to more than 150 countries.
The ingenuity of the object matters less than the reasoning behind it. Prakash built the Foldscope because he refused to accept that limited access to laboratory tools was a fixed condition of the world, someone else’s structural problem to eventually fix. That refusal is exactly what Marx named as the vice he hated most: servility. Intellectual or institutional deference to the way things are already arranged.
Why Not Knowing Can Be an Asset
Freeman Dyson held no PhD. Cornell University made him a professor anyway. He called the PhD system “an abomination,” his argument being that extended doctoral training optimizes young scientists for demonstrating mastery of existing knowledge, which is precisely the opposite of what opens new territory. Researchers who know a field too completely, Dyson suggested, stop asking the questions that could break it open.
He had spent decades working alongside Richard Feynman, Wolfgang Pauli, and Robert Oppenheimer. His argument wasn’t anti-intellectual. It was structural: the institutions designed to produce scientists may, by design, sand down the very quality Marx called simplicity, the unencumbered mind willing to engage with a problem fresh.
The Portrait Was Never Really About Marx
Step back and the pattern emerges across eras, disciplines, and personalities. Simplicity, anti-servility, and systematic doubt aren’t political positions. They describe a specific relationship with received knowledge: treat it as provisional, test it personally, and refuse to defer to it out of habit or status anxiety. That relationship keeps reappearing because it is, roughly speaking, what the experimental impulse is.
In spring 1865, in a house in Holland, a man best known for writing about economics filled out a party game and, without meaning to, described something else entirely. The questionnaire is still there. So are the answers.