One of the main skills that an academic education teaches people is the ability to talk about subjects they know barely anything about whilst sounding like an expert. This can be dangerous in so far as it enables the spread of misinformation. There are numerous examples of grifters with academic credentials who use their perceived epistemic authority to distort the general population’s perception of reality. Someone might be surprised that a person as wrong as Ben Shapiro attended Harvard Law school, but it is precisely the fact that Shapiro attended Harvard which helps to explain why he is able to be so wrong in such a rhetorically persuasive manner. The same is true for people with PhDs and academic careers. Jordan Peterson earned a PhD from McGill university in clinical psychology and subsequently taught at Harvard and Toronto. Despite being a psychologist with bizarre views on women and chaos he nonetheless feels compelled to publicly make things up about subjects he has not studied, such as climate change or Marx. He speaks extremely confidentially and so lots of people believe him.
It might be inferred from examples like this that although one should not trust what an academic says about a topic outside of their field, they should be deferred to when discussing their area of expertise. This rule is motivated by a true claim: someone who has read hundreds of books about a topic, such as the history of socialism, will know more about it than someone who has never read anything on the subject. Yet this general rule does not mean that academics should be automatically believed. One of the main features of any academic discipline is academics constantly disagreeing and arguing with one another. What one academic regards as obviously correct, another believes is outdated and wrong. This especially happens over time as new books and journal articles appear that overturn the previous academic consensus or dominant position. It is furthermore the case that the truth does not care about academic credentials. The beliefs that a person with a PhD expresses are only as good as their arguments, evidence, interpretation of said evidence, citations, sources, and so on.
I am a historian of political thought. When reading about history I often discover that extremely well educated people who teach at prestigious universities have made basic factual errors in their books. In this discipline it is normal for specialists to reasonably disagree with one another about a wide variety of topics, such as what a source is really saying, if an eye witness is reliable or not, or which causal factor is most important. The errors I find are not matters of interpretation and debate. They are simply mistakes. In this essay I will go through a number of examples from famous authors.
Orlando Figes earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge and was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His book A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 is described as a masterpiece or magnum opus by the glowing reviews from journalists that appear in its first two pages. In the book Figes asserts that Marx learned Russian in order to read the novel What Is To Be Done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky (Figes 1997, 130). Of the five sources that Figes cites for this section of the book, I was only able to find four of them (Figes 1997, 831n12). These four sources do not say anything about why Marx learned Russian in the referenced page numbers. One of the cited books claims elsewhere that Marx learned Russian and admired Chernyshevsky but does not connect the two facts together (Szamuely 1974, 371).
I have been unable to find a single primary or secondary source which supports Figes’ assertion. The Marx biographer David McLellan claims that, “a study of the evolution of agriculture in Russia was intended to illuminate Marx’s ideas on ground-rent in Volume Three of Capital in the same way as English industrial development provided the practical examples to the ideas expounded in Volume One. Marx had learnt Russian specifically to be able to study the original sources” (McLellan 1973, 422). McLellan’s narrative is supported by the primary sources. Marx wrote in an 1877 letter that, “in order to reach an informed judgment of the economic development of contemporary Russia, I learned Russian and then spent several long years studying official publications and others with a bearing on this subject” (MECW 24, 199). He appears to have started learning Russian in 1869. On 30 October of that year Jenny, who was Marx’s daughter, wrote a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann in which she reported that Marx, “sends you his kind regards, and hopes you will excuse his [not] writing to you, as at the present moment he is very busy reading a book (which has just appeared in the Russian language, and the reading of which gives him no small amount of trouble) on the condition of the Russian peasantry” (MECW 43, 545. See also ibid 551).
The book that Marx was reading was not a novel. It was N. Flerovsky’s The Condition of the Working Class in Russia (MECW 43, 360, 630n443). Marx informed Engels in a 23 October letter that, “I have been sent from St Petersburg a thick 500-page Flerovsky volume on the condition of the Russian peasants and workers. Unfortunately in Russian” (MECW 43, 362). A month later, on November 29, Marx told Kugelmann that in order to read the book he was having “to grind at Russian” (MECW 43, 389-90). Marx’s progress at reading this book was surprisingly fast given that he had only just started learning the language. In early February 1870 he told Engels that “I have read the first 150 pages of Flerovsky’s book” (MECW 43, 423). After roughly a year of reading Russian Marx was much more confident in his powers. On 21 January 1871 he told Sigfrid Meyer in a letter that,
I don’t know whether I told you that since the beginning of 1870 I have been having to teach myself Russian, which I now read fairly fluently. This came about after I had been sent Flerovsky’s very important work on The Condition of the Working Class (Especially the Peasants) in Russia from St Petersburg; I also wanted to familiarise myself with the (excellent) economic works of Chernyshevsky (who was rewarded by being sentenced to the Siberian mines for the past seven years). The result was worth the effort that a man of my age must make to master a language differing so greatly from the classical, Germanic, and Romance languages (MECW 44, 105).
In this passage Marx is very explicit that he read the “economic works of Chernyshevsky”, rather than his novel. A few years later Marx recommended Chernyshevsky’s Outlines of Political Economy According to Mill in the 1873 afterword to the 2nd German edition of Capital Volume 1 (Marx 1990, 98).
There is some indirect evidence that Marx read Chernyshevsky’s novel but this does not appear until several years after he first learned Russian. In December 1872 he considered writing an overview of Chernyshevsky’s life and thought but ended up abandoning this project (MECW 44, 457). A month later he wrote to Nikolai Danielson, who was his main provider of Russian books, “as to Chernyshevsky, it entirely depends on you whether I confine myself wholly to his scientific work, or touch on his other activities as well. In the second volume of my book he will, of course, only appear as an economist. I am familiar with a major part of his writings” (MECW 44, 469). Marx does not specify if this included fiction. I searched through every volume of the Marx and Engels collected works from 1869 onwards and was only able to find one occasion where Marx made a reference to Chernyshevsky’s novel. In July 1878 Marx wrote in a letter, “what is to be done?, as the Russians say” (MECW 45, 312). This is of course not definitive proof that Marx actually read the novel since it is possible that he heard or read this phrase being used by Russians and decided to copy it. For example, in 1875 Engels responded to a Russian revolutionary who used the phrase (MECW 24, 35). Even if it is assumed that this shows that Marx read the novel, it does not support Figes’ assertion since at this point in time Marx’s Russian was very proficient. All other usages of the phrase that appear are clearly not references to the book, such as when Engels told Marx “you or your wife can of course decide what is to be done with the money” (MECW 46, 104).
Given the above evidence, it is clear that Marx learned Russian in order to study the country’s economics. Figes made an assertion about why Marx chose to learn Russian but did not bother to look through the indexes of the Marx and Engels collected works in order to verify this information. If he had done so, he would have avoided making a mistake. This kind of error does not appear to be a rare occurrence for Figes. In 2012 the academics Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen wrote an article for The Nation in which they claim that Figes’ book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia had its translation into Russian cancelled by the publishers. This occurred after researchers at the Memorial Society, which is a human rights organisation dedicated to the victims of Stalin, were hired to help with the translation but ended up discovering a huge number of minor and major factual errors in Figes’ work. The chief researcher at Memorial is reported to have said “I wept as I read it and tried to make corrections…. I gave only a few examples, but the entire text is like this…. It’s even difficult to choose examples; they appear throughout”.
Jonathan Sperber is professor emeritus at the University of Missouri. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and has written 10 books, most of which are about the social and political history of 19th century Europe. In 2013 he published Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. The book received rave reviews from the mainstream press and was even a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for biography. The journalist Jonathan Freedland described it as “meticulously researched” in a review for The New York Times. The book also contains a number of basic factual errors that could have been easily avoided if Sperber had looked things up. In chapter two Sperber asserts that Hegel and Kant “were both lifelong bachelors, married as it were to the ethereal world of philosophy” (Sperber 2013, 49). He provides no source for this claim. The book’s bibliography contains a single book with Kant’s name in the title and this is a book about the history of antisemitism (Sperber 2013, 619). I checked the book just in case and could not find anything about Kant’s personal life (Rose 1990). Sperber’s endnotes for chapter two references two books on Hegel and his followers (Sperber 2013, 570n21, n35). Neither of these books appear to make any claim about whether Hegel was married or not (Toews 1980; Breckman 1999).
It is common for academics to not provide page references for a fact which is widely known about, such as the fact that WW2 happened or that horses exist. But it is important to provide page references for biographical claims about famous philosophers. This is because, like with any famous person, there are a lot of claims that are repeated about them which are only myth and legend. It is true that Kant was a lifelong bachelor who never married or, as far as we know, had sex (Kuehn 2001, 116-18), but the same is not true of Hegel. Hegel, unlike Kant, got laid. Sperber is aware of this since he refers to the claim that Hegel fathered an illegitimate child with a barmaid (Sperber 2013, 49). There are, however, two major problems with Sperber’s description of Hegel’s sex life. First, the woman Hegel had an illegitimate child with in 1807 was not to my knowledge a barmaid. She was Christiana Charlotte Johanna Burkhardt, his landlady and housekeeper (Pinkard 2000, 192). Second, Hegel married Marie von Tucher in September 1811 (Pinkard 2000, 301). The fact Hegel married is also mentioned in the standard introductions to Hegel, such as those by Tom Rockmore, Frederick Beiser, and Stephen Houlgate (Rockmore 1993, 43; Beiser 2005, 15; Houlgate 2005, xiv).
Sperber, to his credit, fixed this error in later printings of the book. But it is not the only factual error that he made. He claims that Marx and Engels “met in person for the first time” in August 1844 whilst Marx was living in Paris (Sperber 2013, 136). This is false. Marx and Engels met in person for the first time in November 1842 whilst Marx was editor of the Rhineland News and lived in Cologne. In 1895 Engels recalled that, “when I dropped in again towards the end of November on my way to England, I ran into Marx there and that was the occasion of our first, distinctly chilly meeting” (MECW 50, 503). Sperber should know about this because he references David McLellan and Francis Wheen’s biographies of Marx several times. Both McLellan and Wheen very clearly mention this fact just before discussing Marx and Engels’ second meeting in Paris (McLellan 1973, 130-31; Wheen 2001, 75).
Although I have cited McLellan’s biography of Marx twice in this essay, that does not mean that it is perfect and free from factual errors. McLellan completed his PhD at Oxford and went onto become the professor of political theory at the University of Kent and then Goldsmith’s college, University of London. He has written several good books about the theory and history of Marx specifically and Marxism in general. He also makes mistakes. McLellan claims that Marx’s school grades were as follows: “Latin and Greek verse were good, his Religion satisfactory, his French and Mathematics weak, and his History (strangely) weakest of all” (McLellan 1973, 10). When I first read this I believed it and assumed it was true because there was no way McLellan would get something so simple wrong. I was amazed that Marx, who would go onto develop one of the most influential theories of history, had done badly in history at school. I thought it said something about how school grades are not destiny and people can grow and improve as they age. I even posted this fact on twitter with a supporting page reference, only to be told by strangers on the internet that I was wrong. I could not believe this and looked up Marx’s school grades for myself only to discover that the strangers on the internet were right.
The certificate that Marx received at the age of 17 upon passing his exams and leaving school claimed that, “he has good aptitudes, and in ancient languages, German, and history showed a very satisfactory diligence, in mathematics satisfactory, and in French only slight diligence” (MECW 1, 643). It reported that his knowledge and performance was best in German, Latin and Ancient Greek. His knowledge in other subjects is described as follows: “in French, his knowledge of grammar is fairly good; with some assistance he reads also more difficult passages and has some facility in oral expression”; “his knowledge of the Christian faith and morals is fairly clear and well grounded; he knows also to some extent the history of the Christian Church”; “he has a good knowledge of mathematics”; “in History and Geography he is in general fairly proficient;” “in physics his knowledge is moderate” (MECW 1, 643-44). From this it is clear that history was not teenage Marx’s worst subject. His performance in history was
comparable to other subjects, such as French, religious studies, and geography. McLellan is also wrong to claim that Marx’s performance in mathematics was worse than his performance in religious studies. He appears to have made this mistake because he repeated what another secondary source said. At the time of writing, the Marx and Engels collected works in English and MEGA2, which is the second version of the Marx and Engels complete works, had yet to be published.
A reader might respond to this essay be describing me as a pedant, to which I would reply that this is true. I would, in addition to this, point out that I am much more pedantic with myself than with anyone else. I have a PhD in the history of anarchism and care about citations so much that even my instagram posts include page references. I drove myself crazy double checking all 1260 endnotes in my book Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States over the course of an entire month. In addition to this, I double checked every single date in the book was correct and that every single quote was typed out correctly. I cannot begin to describe how boring it was to do this. This was the second time I had done this and yet I still found errors that had to be fixed. There is a part of me that wanted to do it a third time just in case. Although I am a perfectionist, this does not mean that my book is perfect. As anyone who has listened to me on a podcast misremember something I read several years ago knows, I also make mistakes. In chapter one of my book I write that “Bakunin first publicly called himself an “anarchist” in August 1867 in ‘The Slavic Question’” (Baker 2023, 30). This is false. The article was published in two parts. The first part appeared on 31 August and the second part on 8 September. The passage in which Bakunin calls himself an anarchist is from the second part published in September. I should have given September as the month because I am referring to when a statement was publicly made, rather than when Bakunin privately wrote it prior to its publication (Eckhardt 2016, 453, n47). I made this mistake because I did not read an endnote carefully enough.
The writing of history is, to a significant extent, built on trust. No historian has the time or energy to thoroughly fact check every single book they read. Nor is total fact checking always possible since often the source for a claim is in an archive in a different country or in a language that one cannot read. As a result, historians generally have to trust that another historian did the work properly and is accurately reporting the information that they found. But I find it hard to trust the work of other historians because I have been hurt too many times. On several occasions I have investigated a claim only to find out that what I thought was a rational conclusion drawn from a serious and thorough evaluating of the evidence, was actually an arbitrary opinion, a pure fabrication, or a misreading of a source. Whenever I discover that another historian has made an error, it plants a seed of doubt in my mind. If Sperber was so wrong about Hegel’s sex life and did such little research into the topic, then how can I trust anything he says about any topic? This is why I love it when historians quote primary sources at length. I no longer need to take their word for it and can instead see and assess the evidence for myself.
Academia is full of what could be called the aesthetics of scholarship. A person writes confidently and cites a large number of sources and so must know what they are talking about. Another person is given a professorship with a ridiculously long title and so is clearly one of the best in their field. It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between someone who is an expert and someone who has learned to write like an expert. It can be easy for academics to believe in and internalise these aesthetics to the point that they mistake their opinions for knowledge. They must be right about a topic because they are a big brained person who did well at school, went to an elite university, got a PhD in the field, published articles in top peer-reviewed journals and so on. At this point academic qualifications shift from evidence that a person has seriously studied a topic to what is, for all intents and purposes, an appeal to authority. Such mental narratives ignore that intelligence does not guarantee correctness and often just enables a person to be wrong in a very elaborate manner.
Academics should of course be read if you want to learn about a topic. Researching even a small question can take years of dedicated work and so it is worthwhile to read what the people who have done this work have to say. The acquisition of knowledge is a collective effort and the research of one person is always built on the efforts of a huge number of other people. Life is short. Every decision to devote time towards learning about one topic, takes away time that could have been spent on another topic. It is not possible to become an expert on everything and so we have no choice but to rely on the expertise of others. But academics should also be read critically and skeptically. When reading history I try to apply two general rules. First, if a historian does not have a supporting source, do not automatically believe them or take their word for it. As wikipedia puts it, “citation needed”. Second, even if a historian has a source keep in mind that the source could not be saying any of the points they make or could include information that contradicts them. In other words, just because a sentence ends with a citation does not mean it is true or grounded in any evidence.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Penguin Books.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1975. Collected Works, Volume 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. Collected Works, Volume 24. 1989. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. Collected Works, Volume 43. 1988. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. Collected Works, Volume 44. 1989. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. Collected Works, Volume 45. 1991. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. Collected Works, Volume 46. 1992. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. Collected Works, Volume 50. 2004. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Secondary Sources
Baker, Zoe. 2023. Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Hegel. New York: Routledge.
Breckman, Warren. 1999. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Houlgate, Stephen. 2005. An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History 2nd Edition. Blackwell Publishing.
Eckhardt, Wolfgang. 2016. The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin VS. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Figes, Orlando. 1997. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. London: Pimlico.
Kuehn, Manfred. 2001. Kant, A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McLellan, David. 1973. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
Pinkard, Terry. 2000. Hegel, A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rockmore, Tom. 1993. Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel’s Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Rose, Paul Lawrence. 1990. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Sperber, Jonathan. 2013. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Szamuely, Tibor. 1974. The Russian Tradition. London: Martin Secker & Warburg.
Toews, John Edward. 1980. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wheen, Francis. 2001. Karl Marx: A Life. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Zoe Baker 
nice