Marx's Fame: Not Revolutionary

Steven Durlauf, Laurent Gauthier () and Antoine Parent
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Steven Durlauf: University of Chicago
Laurent Gauthier: CAC-IXXI, Complex Systems Institute, ESPRI - Espace, Pratiques sociales et Images dans les mondes Grec et Romain - ArScAn - Archéologies et Sciences de l'Antiquité - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - UP8 - Université Paris 8 - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - MCC - Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: This paper presents a critique of Magness and Makovi (2023), which argues that the enormous prominence of Karl Marx in scholarship over the last century is essentially a consequence of the 1917 Russian Revolution as opposed to the intellectual merit of his ideas per se. Their claim is developed by comparing citations of Marx with a synthetic control-based alternative for whom pre-1917 citations track those of Marx. The post-revolution divergence in citations leads these authors to conclude that, had the Bolsheviks not been self-defined followers of Marx, his 20 th century scholarly visibility would be minor. We show that the data employed by Magness and Makovi are equally consistent with the opposite view that Marx's prominence is due to the substance of his ideas, once one considers standard econometric identification problems. We conclude that the Magness and Makovi claim is unproven. Our discussion has general implications for evaluating the evolution of ideas and for the use of citation data.

Keywords: Marx; Bibliometrics; History of ideas; Russian Revolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10-30
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05388328

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5708762

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