Re-reading Sowell on Marx and Marxism. It begins with a thoughtful balanced overview of Marx’s philosophy and economics and then gives Sowell’s evaluation. Some great lines:

• Marxism “provides a rationalisation for dismissing ideas according to their supposed origins – bourgeois, for example – instead of confronting them in either factual or logical terms.”

• “Much of the intellectual legacy of Marx is an anti-intellectual legacy. It has been said that you cannot refute a sneer.”

• “The Marxian vision took the overwhelming complexity of the real world and made the parts fall into place, in a way that was intellectually exhilarating and conferred such sense of moral superiority that opponents could be simply labelled and dismissed as moral lepers or blind reactionaries.”

• “The hubris of imagining that a whole society could be constructed from the ground up on the vision of one man, rather than evolving from the experience of millions, spread over the generations or centuries.”

• “The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods – much less for the social consequences of their vision – has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements…”

• “Intellectuals enjoy a similar insulation from the consequences of being wrong, in a way that no businessman, military leader, engineer of even athletic coach can. Intellectuals and the young have remained historically the groups most susceptible to Marxism…”

• “The Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed.”

• “The massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone – a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius “proved” capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.”

• “Some of the most distinguished names in Western civilization – have become apologists for brutal dictatorships ruling in the name of Marx and committing atrocities that they would never countenance under another label. People who could never be corrupted by money or power may nevertheless be blinded by a vision.”