Should We Quantify Karl Marx?

Joseph Francis

Econ Journal Watch, 2024, vol. 21, issue 2, 357–384

Abstract: A 2023 article by Phillip Magness and Michael Makovi in the Journal of Political Economy contends that Karl Marx had little intellectual influence before the Russian Revolution. Yet the back issues of that same journal show that Marx was well-known in the decade before 1917, and that impression is confirmed by name searches of the JSTOR database. Furthermore, Magness and Makovi have misapplied the synthetic control method because no combination of other authors from the Google Ngram Viewer can be a meaningful proxy for Marx. A growing share of N-grams is, in any case, more an indication of Marx’s fame than his intellectual influence. Ultimately, quantitative methods are of limited use and the more traditional tools of intellectual history should be used to determine both what Marx’s ideas actually were and how their influence has evolved over time.

Keywords: Karl Marx; Russian Revolution; synthetic control method; quantitative methods; intellectual history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B14 B24 B31 B51 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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