Karl Marx has just been voted most popular philosopher ever in Britain. In the Melvin Bragg "In Our Time" survey he scored 28 percent of the vote, twice as much as the next, David Hume. Marx's popularity was eloquently defended by Eric Hobsbawm on the BBC‚s Today programme.

A perceptive graduate student once described me as a Vulgar Marxist. Vulgar, sure, as a rude Scot, but why Marxist I asked? Marx had no faith in the state, "just like you" was the reply. Curiously, as a revolutionary against the state, Marx has been used to justify state intervention across the world.

Most of the social sciences in British universities seem to be influenced by para-Marxist sympathies such as anti-capitalism, anti-market, pro state intervention, and property rights controlled by the state. This is more so in French, Italian and other EU universities. In Japan some two decades ago it was hard to find an economics department in any university not dominated by Marxist thinking. The sciences are increasingly pervaded by this thinking in America (with Britain close behind), with concepts like consensus and the Green agenda. In America anti-market, anti-capitalism is harder to find. The Democrats rely on constraining, and maybe eventually strangling, capitalism by endemic regulation.

The propensity to misinterpret Marx for political purposes is replicated by dedicated followers of Keynes. The economies of America and Britain are now driven by the policy consensus that economic growth is fuelled by consumer demand and an optimum rate of inflation, for which Keynes must take some credit. Although when I offer this view in Cambridge seminars it is vehemently resisted.

What are we to make of Marx's win? That the BBC and academe exist in a twilight world where his discredited ideas still count? That he was judged for the influence wrought on history in his name? Hobsbawm says that where other philosophers promoted thought, Marx achieved action and change. In that respect he probably wins on body count alone.