An interesting article by Walter Lacquer on Isaiah Berlin versus Isaac Deutscher titled, Better to be Wrong than Right? For some intellectuals, it all depends. I read both when I was much younger but of the two I can only think I have been influenced by Isaiah Berlin. The article ends like the title itself with a paraphrase of something Arthur Koestler wrote in one of his books about some Stalinist who believed, given the circumstances of the 1930s, that while it was wrong to have supported Stalin he had been right to be wrong. This is how it is put by Lacquer:

As the leftist French journalist Jean Daniel once put it: better to be wrong with Jean-Paul Sartre than right with Raymond Aron. Sartre might have been consistently wrong in his political judgment and his intellectual opponent Aron almost always right. But Sartre, like Deutscher, was pro-Soviet during the cold war while Aron, like Isaiah Berlin, was pro-American (and also, like Berlin, pro-Israel). And that settled the matter.

This is how reputations quite often develop in the world of ideas, and how they endure—an interesting issue itself, and certainly one in need of further investigation.

If you’re on the left, your reputation is impregnable. There is no need of investigation. There are almost no major leftists of the past whose names are mud. Not Stalin, not Mao although maybe Pol Pot who simply gets ignored except by people like me. That is just how it is and will remain.