“The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence”, 2023-05-16 ():
Karl Marx’s high academic stature outside of economics diverges sharply from his peripheral influence within the discipline, particularly after 19th-century developments rendered the labor theory of value obsolete. We hypothesize that the 1917 Russian Revolution is responsible for elevating Marx into the academic mainstream.
Using the synthetic control method, we construct a counterfactual for Marx’s citation patterns in Google Ngram data. This allows us to predict how often Marx would have been cited if the Russian Revolution had not happened.
We find a large treatment effect, meaning that Marx’s academic stature today owes a substantial debt to political happenstance.
…The low esteem for Marx’s Capital at the turn of the century was succinctly captured by C. Violet Butler’s (1907117ya, pg560) dismissive assessment in the Economic Journal, “Who should tilt at such a windmill?” By 1925, no less a source than John Maynard Keynes ([192599ya] 1931, pg258) would describe the same work as “an obsolete economic textbook … without interest or application for the modern world.”
A century later, Marx enjoys an immense scholarly stature—albeit almost entirely outside of economics. His critiques of capitalism are taught as foundational texts in sociology, political theory, philosophy, and literary criticism, and his socioeconomic doctrines of alienation, class consciousness, and historical materialism exert heavy influence through the academically fashionable analytical frameworks of critical theory, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies. An outpouring of commemorations on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth confirms the acclaim he currently attracts in academic writing.1 David McLellan (198737ya, pg322) summarized this reputation in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought: “Over the whole range of the social sciences, Marx has proved probably the most influential figure of the twentieth century.”
Several empirical measures illustrate Marx’s substantial intellectual reach today. Using a discipline-normalized h-index of 35,000 authors estimated from Google Scholar citation counts, Van 2013 reported that Marx was the single “most influential scholar” in history as of 2013. Appearing in 3,856 syllabi as of 2015, Marx’s Communist Manifesto is consistently among the most frequently assigned texts in American college classrooms. Excluding textbooks and grammar manuals, only Plato’s Republic (3,573) appeared with comparable frequency. Marx’s writings were assigned at roughly twice the rate of principal works by other famous thinkers, including John Stuart Mill (1,969), Charles Darwin (1,701), Adam Smith (1,587), and Martin Luther King Junior (1,985). Although Marx’s more sophisticated Capital fell below the comparatively accessible Manifesto, in 1,798 syllabi it still outranked not only Smith but also Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1,427), John Locke’s Second Treatise (1,045), and John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1,248).2