So there's kind of a paradox here. Marx is this bonded intellectual who's the major figure of the late 19th century versus Marx, this guy that's so obscure that his funeral basically goes unnoticed and is not really discussed or talked

about in any mainstream substantive way for several decades after his death.

So I start investigating these claims.

Phil Magnus is an economic historian and senior fellow at

the Independent Institute. In this episode he breaks down his research into the

true origins of the popularity of Karl Marx.

What really put Marx on the intellectual map was not the weight of his contributions

in Das Kapital, it's not him engaging in major debates.

It's actually a political event.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelleck.

Phil Magnus, such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders.

Thanks for having me.

So there's this, I guess, mythology about Carl Marx tapping into the zeitgeist of the 19th century, you know coming up with this

grand idea and suddenly it captures everyone's imagination and things take off. And you've done some really interesting work that suggests that this is really not the case.

And I want to explore that today, so tell me about this.

Absolutely.

So Marx is very well known as like the founding figure of communist ideology.

He inspired tons of movements across the 20th century, the most famous being the Soviet Union, and is

considered a major figure in the intellectual canon. And with this comes kind of

this mythology that Marx had figured something out about the human condition in the 19th century.

He had seen factory workers in poverty and extreme situations in the workplace that were not good in the late 19th century and supposedly

had figured out that this tapped into a major problem with free market capitalist economic exchanges and he had supposedly

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