leaders. Many past and present leaders have had personal advisors whose counsel they take quite seriously and incorporate into their rule. A study of the influence of intellectuals in government reveals that they tend to be characteristically left of centerùoften socialistùin their leanings; in fact socialism itself was the product of intellectuals:
Socialism has never and nowhere been at
first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program (Hayek 371).
An explanation for this phenomenon is offered by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who points out that intellectuals were often poor and dependent, making them easily enlisted by a king to justify the ideology that
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