Who’s who in philosophy on Wikipedia? Who gets dragged out of the comfortable or more ascetic ivory towers? Is it Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx? Friedrich Nietzsche or Niccolo Machiavelli? Slavoj Zizek, Noam Chomsky or Judith Butler? Socrates, Plato or Aristotle? Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre? Have a guess and then check out how the battle has turned out.

Apparently, we look up philosophers in the cold months of autumn and winter, perhaps when we're more likely to get existential angst and melancholy from little sun and vitamin D deficiency. Since it’s cold outside now, enjoy your snapshot of philosophy in the (digital) polis. A glimpse into the stats may not tell you about the darkest corners of your soul (may you want to get there) but it may reveal how narratives and digital trends get created, and how philosophy can get out there, to wider audiences. In the spirit of the internet, we also brought you a quote from each of the philosophers in the top that might seem particularly relevant at the end of 2017.

In the 2017 Wiki battle of Idealism versus Materialism, the absolute winner is… Marx, with over 2.75 million views. With the considerable fewer yet solid 1.23 million views, Kant’s transcendental idealism has perhaps been less relevant in a world gone mad.

Every year, the spikes come on Marx’s birthday on 5^th May, as well as on the day he died, 14^th March. The next spike in 2017 came on the centenary of the Russian Revolution on 7^th November. Pretty basic stuff so far.

But 2017 is not the first year in which Marx asserts his dictatorship of the proletariat over Wikipedia’s philosophers. In 2016 his page got over 2.6 million views, and in 2015 - over 2.8 million views, July to June (there is no view history before July 2015 on Wiki). Initially, we thought Marx’s popularity is due to Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign. But it looks like the spikes of 2015 and 2016 were caused by online sensations such as the release of an episode of the video game Assasin’s Creed on Marx, and a piece gone viral on how ironic it is that one has to pay $6 to see Marx’s grave in North London. 

Since 2017 has been marked by a surge of feminism in mainstream debates, we’ll have two quotes on women which might also explain why Marx feels more relevant than Kant today. 

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Marx:  “Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.” vs

Kant: “The desire of a man for a woman is not directed at her as a human being, on the contrary, the woman’s humanity is of no concern to him; and the only object of his desire is her sex.”

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In the fight of the bad boys of philosophy, Nietzsche wins with 2.38 million views in 2017 (quite a lot more than in 2016, when his page got just under 2 million views), while Machiavelli got 1.34 million views (a similar number to the previous year).

Nietzsche had a spike in November both in 2017 and 2016, which confirms the general pattern that philosophers tend to become popular on Wikipedia when the cold and grey outside might make us contemplate the meaninglessness of life.