ABSTRACT
Historians are fond of saying—usually as an aside—that important ideas eventually “trickle down” to the masses. That they rarely follow the trickles is an indication not only of the state of the historical craft, but also of the difficulties and imponderables inherent in such a pursuit. Reading popular authors and assessing their impact is often neither rewarding nor easy. But when analyzing Marxism, it is essential that those trickles of popularizationbe followed. For if the masses are cast in a central role as historical actors, we must know what they read and thought to understand why they acted (or failed to act) as they did. Massive tomes on learned socialist theoreticians, whom the masses neither read nor understood, are likely to be misleading. The most we could infer from such works is that the workingman’s view of socialism was a dim, oversimplified reflection of sophisticated ideology—akind of clichéd Kautskyism or thirdhand Marxism.
