Granted, the poll was conducted in Europe and among BBC readers. But the staggering lopsidedness of Karl Marx’s victory as the leading philosopher of our age is nothing short of stunning:
The puzzlement is understandable. Fifteen years ago, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, there appeared to be a general assumption that Marx was now an ex-parrot. He had kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil and been buried forever under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. No one need think about him – still less read him – ever again.
‘What we are witnessing,’ Francis Fukuyama proclaimed at the end of the Cold War, ‘is not just the … passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.’
But history soon returned with a vengeance. By August 1998, economic meltdown in Russia, currency collapses in Asia and market panic around the world prompted the Financial Times to wonder if we had moved ‘from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade’. The article was headlined ‘Das Kapital Revisited’.
The article offers a brief glimpse as to why this might be.
The result of this week’s BBC poll suggests that Marx’s portrayal of the forces that govern our lives – and of the instability, alienation and exploitation they produce – still resonates, and can still bring the world into focus. Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, he may only now be emerging in his true significance. For all the anguished, uncomprehending howls from the right-wing press, Karl Marx could yet become the most influential thinker of the 21st century.
What bothers me slightly more is who came in second place: David Hume with over 12%. A distant third is Wittgenstein, followed by Neitzche, Plato, Kant, Aquinas, Socrates, Aristotle, and Karl Popper.
Now it could be argued that we are talking about the most influential philosophers of our time. In one sense, the rise and fall of Marxist Socialism can be a signpost of influence. But what of the philosophies that brought the edifice down? Aquinas at 7th place?! No mention of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Mill (none of the “social contract” philosophers made the cut), Kierkegaard, St. Augustine, Suarez, Descartes, Derrida, and suprisingly for a British poll, no Bertrand Russell.
I wonder what an American poll would look like? I would imagine Locke would fare much better, as would Aquinas (Thomistic philosophy is all the rage in Catholic universities here in the States). Still, it’s disturbing to think that Marx is enjoying a renaissance of sorts in a post-Soviet era.