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Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is one of the most productive—and provocative—working scholars today (with emphasis on working, as his output is prodigious).
This classic format episode features Steve Hayward and Phil in a one-on-one conversation about three of Phil’s major areas of current research, starting with his co-authored article that breaks new ground in the history of Marxism, “The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence,” published recently in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the premier journals in economics. The article is causing heads to explode on the left, which means he must have hit a nerve.
From there we talk about the history of the intellectual left’s favorite epithet today, “neoliberalism,” but also about how the term has been embraced with almost the same pejorative meaning by some leading thinkers on the right. Is this a good idea?
Finally, as Phil has been one of the pre-eminent critics of the 1619 Project from the moment it first appeared four years ago, we catch up on the latest iterations of that popular leftist propaganda effort.
Everyone should follow Phil on Twitter, @PhilWMagness, and you’ll see how he lives rent-free every day inside the heads of leftists.
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I really long for the timeline where Marx is an obscure failure…
<<Sorry posted in the wrong episode>>
Marx is the one dead white male that Universities will keep in the curriculum.
Don’t give them any ideas! Who would they replace him with? Qaddafi? Idi Amin?
EDIT:
Never mind… I realize Mao…
I love these intellectual history episodes. I’ll likely listen to it again, go another round with the content.
Good podcast!
Consider this perspective: If we, as some brand of Lincolnian constitutional conservatives, accept that the Constitution remained valid after the Civil War, one might question why we cannot embrace Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 interpretation of history. One must examine the events during Reconstruction, questioning their constitutionality. Were Grant’s Supreme Court rulings on legal tender in accordance with the Constitution? Furthermore, one may ponder the very constitutionality of the Civil War itself.
Perhaps it would be reasonable to afford Jones’s brand of Critical Race Theory some historical grounding, similar to the grounding our interpretations find through Lincoln. Ultimately, both approaches appear somewhat dubious, at best. Why should we impose our beliefs on her? There are ample falsehoods for each of us to contend with.
I do not wish to overstate this, but it is possible that @johnyoo (‘s) reservations regarding the incorporation of natural law into modern constitutional law stem from a similar line of thinking. While he may personally hold natural law in high regard, it is arguable that it no longer finds a place in contemporary constitutional law, particularly since the time of Lincoln.
Marx’s problem is that he concocted his theories in the 1840s, collecting ideas that were around at the time and, magpie-like, claiming them for his own.
Thus Austrian School economists like Bohm-Bawerk and Mises pointed out his plagiarizing the labor theory of value from Rodbertus.
Now, the labor theory of value became obsolete in the 1860s, with the so-called marginalist revolution. But without it, the Marxian exploitation theory falls, so Marx, a far better politician than an economist, had to hold onto it.
Similarly, Marxism is based on the laughable Lamarckian theory of evolution, because in 1848 the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species was still 11 years in the future.