Sentence:  And it is clearly argued by Lord Percy of Newcastle , in his remarkable long essay , The Heresy of Democracy , and in a more general way by Voegelin , in his New Science of Politics , that this same Rousseauan idea , descending through European democracy , is the source of Marx 's theory of the dictatorship of the <WSD>proletariat</WSD> . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  a social class comprising those who do manual labor or work for wages