Why the intellectuals are still drawn to socialism: revisiting Hayek's warning at 75 years

Phillip W. Magness

Chapter 2 in Hayek’s Living Legacy in Economics, Philosophy and Policy, 2026, pp 15-34 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: F.A. Hayek observed that “socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.” His words reflected a time when socialist thought, and particularly Marxism, was a rising geopolitical force. The purpose of the chapter is to ask why Karl Marx's reputation is so resilient among the intellectuals, even though Marxism remains a rejected doctrine in the economics discipline, appearing only as a passing reference to his place in the history of economic thought. Even those who tried to make Marx's system work eventually came to concede its internal inconsistencies. The main hypothesis is straightforward: the Soviet Union rescued Marx from relative obscurity in 1917 and thrust him into the intellectual mainstream. To support the theory, we present the analysis via Synthetic Control Method, which allows us to construct a counterfactual citation pattern for Karl Marx to test an alternative scenario in which the events of 1917 never happened.

Keywords: Socialism; Marxism; Soviet Union; Bibliometrics; Counterfactual Citation Analysis; Synthetic Control Method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035394234
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