Did Marx Make Lenin, or Did Lenin Make Marx?

David BoazWas Karl Marx one of the towering intellectual figures of the 19th century? It certainly seems that way. His work iswidelyassigned in college courses,far more than for instance John Locke and Adam Smith, much less F. A. Hayek or Ludwig von Mises.But recently Phil Magness and Michael Makovi have advanced a  different hypothesis: That Marx was a relatively minor figure in his own time, especially after the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s decisively refuted his economic analysis, and his reputation soared only after the Bolshevik Revolution — or the coup led by Vladimir Lenin — of 1917. See their academic paperhere and a  popular articlehere.Recently I  was looking atideological bias inBartlett ’s Familiar Quotations, and I  noticed that the book included 23 quotations from Marx. That’s the same as the combined total for John Locke and Adam Smith, thephilosophical architects of our modern liberal world. (And far more than Hayek, Mises, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, or William F. Buckley Jr.)But I  wondered: how far back did Marx get such play inBartlett ’s, which has been published in 19 editions since 1855? What I  found seems to add support to the thesis of Magness and Makovi. Marx (with Friedrich Engels) had 18 citations in the 1992 edition. That is, in Bartlett’s his relevance seems only to have risen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But looking at previous editions, I see that Marx is not menti oned in the1874 edition, published well after...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs