William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
MISCELLANEOUS BIBLIOGRAPHY
The sources of Marxian economic theory and cognate subjects are listed by J. Stammhammer, Bibliographie des Sozialismus und Kommunismus, in three volumes, published in Jena from 1893 to 1909. Although these contain numerous omissions, Stammhammer is still the most dependable source for reference.
Despite the war confusion in Europe, and consequent scholarly incompleteness, the effort of Ernest Drahn in his Marx-Bibliographie (2d ed. 1923) to summarize the literature is still helpful, especially for that centering about the debate on imperialism and dictatorship of the proletariat. He also covers a much wider range, and, because of new items, makes up for Stammhammer’s defects.
E. Czobel and P. Hadju, associated with the Moscow Marx-Engels Archives, have listed in Volume I of that institute’s researches (pp. 467-549) literature strictly concerned with Marx and Engels that appeared in 1914-1925.
The Select Bibliography of Modern Economic Theory from 1870 to 1929 by H. E. Batson (N. Y., 1930) is grossly inadequate on Marxism. The most significant criticisms that have entered into classic economic literature are ignored.
I have not included a good summary of Russian and Italian sources, because it would be a useless parade of pedantry. Many curiosities are cited in Lenin’s Teachings of Karl Marx. The works of Russian critics, such as Maslov on rent theory, for example, are said to be important, but so long as they are not translated into Western languages will be available to few students.
Under the captions, Dialectical Materialism, Socialism, Socialist Economics, Karl Marx, etc., the New Encyclopaedia of Social Science and, under similar headings, the older Encyclopaedia of Social Reform of W. D. P. Bliss, are helpful for the literature.
The most precious sources, though, are given in Grünberg’s Archiv d. Sozialismus (Frankfort, 1910-1933); Die Neue Zeit, official organ of the German Social Democratic party for forty years, which contains a wealth of Marxian economic studies including such brilliant analysts as Otto Bauer and “Parvus,” whose answers to the Austrian School are scintillating: the Communist intellectual clearing house, Unter der Banner des Marxismus; four years’ wealth of documentation on the agrarian question, Agrar-Studien; the Socialist publication of Hilferding directed against the Third International, Gesellschaft; the series of agricultural and fiscal studies in Cahiers du Bolchevisme (Paris); also the psychological, literary, economic, and critical articles in the beautifully written French Marxian review Commune.
For the United States the scholar can best consult the literature references in J. R. Commons’s History of Labor in the United States (2 V., 1921); A. M. Simons’s Social Forces in American History (N. Y, 1915); M. Hillquit’s lively if slick History of Socialism in the United States (N. Y., 1903); for the Utopian developments in America, J. H. Noyes’s History of American Socialism (1870) is useful. Nordhoffs study of the same subject is more humane and literary.1 The best documentation on American early Socialism and its theories is in German: R. Liefmann’s Die kommunistischen Gemeinde in Amerika cites complete literature. The work of Bimba, The History of the American Working Class, gives scattered sources.2
The Marxian publications houses whose catalogues may be consulted (especially those for past years) are Charles H. Kerr & Company (Chicago), International Publishers (New York), S. L. P. Press (Cliff Street, New York), Lawrence & Wishart (London), and Editions Sociales Internationales (Paris). The last-named firm is doing the most for original work in Marxian sources. The present repression in Germany has led to the formation of two large Marxian publishing houses, Querido-Verlag in Amsterdam and Opprecht und Helbling in Zürich.
Latterly two critical periodicals have been founded in English-speaking lands, Science and Society in the United States and the Modern Quarterly in England. The Labor Monthly of London, organ of R. P. Dutt, has long been an arena of Marxian theoretical discussion.
It is impossible here to refer to the spate of learned Marxian periodicals that have appeared and disappeared. The New Review of New York (1913-15), for example, can be cited for its remarkable intellectual contributions, as also the more popular International Socialist Review. As to dictionaries, they are legion. The best are Compère-Morel’s Dictionnaire du Socialisme, and the various labor guides, such as the Labor Fact Books of the Labor Research Bureau, American Labor Annuals, etc. (also those of the British Labour Research Bureau).
I have left out of account the immense number of books on Bolshevism, the contemporary labor movement, etc., unless they illustrate some point in the economic theory of Marx, or in those philosophic aspects of Marx not easily separated from his economic system. To have enumerated the shoals of literature on Socialism is a form of bibliographical map-making that would serve no theoretical purpose.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MARX AND ENGELS
NOTE: NO complete edition of the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels exists in any language. During the last fifteen years the Marx-Engels Institute at Moscow has pursued the task of re-establishing the early texts and a fair number of these have appeared in German. When it is recalled that Marx was a prolific journalist and untiring correspondent and turned to a flysheet as well as to the most compendious treatises in economic science, it will be seen that his complete works are not easily brought together, nor are those of Engels.
In the following list, wherever the English version exists it has been preferred to the German. But until recently the translation of Marx was extremely doubtful. New texts are being set up and with the aid of such scholars as Dona Torr in England we may hope that the English versions may yet be written in English instead of a mock-German. The ideas of Marx and Engels have often been falsified by bad translations.3
Capital, Vol. I. There are several translations, the best of which is the Samuel Moore version. The Untermann translation is second, and of the many others, the Borchardt edition in the Modern Library and that of the Pauls should be shunned. For practical purposes, however, the Kerr edition of Capital, both the Aveling-Untermann version of Volume I and the Untermann versions of Volumes II and III, must be used by the scholar until something better appears.
Theorien über der Mehrwert. This critical history of political economy, the best account of the science down to the time of John Stuart Mill, is available in the Kautsky (Stuttgart) version in 3 volumes, or in the far more readable Histoire des doctrines économiques in French. If Marxian publishers do not soon undertake this in English, they are derelict in their duty.
Critique of Political Economy. The Kerr version, that is the translation of N. I. Stone, was published in Chicago, 1910. This little book badly needs a new translation, despite the fidelity of Stone. It is being undertaken by Lawrence and Wishart in London. The Critique is little more than the antechamber to Theorien über der Mehrwert, but its statement of historical materialism makes it extremely important, as also its remarkable study of the money theory.
Communist Manifesto. Available as a dime pamphlet; critical edition by Adoratsky; best edition in French by Andler.
Value, Price, and Profit and Wage-Labor and Capital (Engels’s reworking) are available in the Marxist Library (New York), No. 37, or as dime pamphlets.
The Poverty of Philosophy is in the Marxist Library (New York), No. 26 (Kerr edition, 1910).
The Civil War in France concerning the Paris Commune (with the famous preface of Engels) is in the Marxist Library as No. 9.
Class Struggles in France, dealing with the first open struggle of bourgeois vs. proletariat in the June days of 1848 in Paris, is Marxist Library No. 9. It should be read as a counterfoil to the criticism of Turgeon, in his Materialisme historique.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is in the Marxist Library as No. 35 and is famous because of the attempt to delineate the minute differences of class interest between sections of the bourgeoisie.
The Civil War in the United States is a collection of articles and letters by Marx and Engels defending the North in the struggle and pointing out the imperialist significance of the establishment of the Southern Confederacy. Historians like Randall in this country could still do with its wealth of economic revelations. Regrettably, the work of Schlueter on the relations of Lincoln and labor have not been stressed here. This is Marxist Library No. 30.
Correspondence of Marx and Engels (Marxist Library No. 29) is a selection, and a very well chosen one, of the two most continuous theoretical correspondents of whom we have had a record (unless the theory of household and salons of Mme de Sévigné be so considered). The average student could use little more.
Letters to Kugelmann (Marxist Library No. 17) are a series of letters, largely on political economy, addressed, of all things, to a friend who was a gynaecologist in Hanover. Perhaps Marx, who always considered the proletariat the midwife of a new social order, might consider this economic explanation appropriate. Kugelmann later disagreed with Marx but not on the economic matters whose discussion here makes Marx simple.
Critique of the Gotha Program. A work of overshadowing politicoeconomic importance. If this little brochure is studied closely, everything Marx did not represent and which ignorant opinion says he did, is refuted. His differences from Lasalle are made vivid. Marx’s pamphlet was perused constantly by Lenin, whose notes reveal his thinking. (Marxist Library No. 11.)
The Eastern Question. Marx, as a friend of Charles A. Dana and Albert Brisbane and correspondent of the Fourierist, Horace Greeley, wrote a large number of articles for the New York Tribune at the time of the Crimean War. This compilation contains errors, for some of the articles attributed to Marx by his daughter, Eleanor Aveling (translator of Madame Bovary), were included in error. Many of the alleged “mistaken” prophecies of Marx cited by forward journalists are drawn from these spurious articles. The compilation was published by Swan, Sonnenschein in London (1897).
Herr Vogt. This philosophical polemic, written in 1860, was published by Kerr of Chicago and has never been reprinted. It has no economic importance.
Economic Studies (German). Gesamtausgabe (Frankfort); Vol. III, Section I, Part 2 of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels projected by the Marx-Engels Institute. Complete economic studies of Marx written in Paris prior to 1846 and invaluable for the early history of Marx’s economic ideas; issued in 1932. The Hitler government has prevented its continuance at Frankfort.
The German Ideology. This evaluation of the position of Arnold Ruge and Feuerbach appeared in an English dress for the first time in 1939 (London).4
Briefwechsel Marx-Lasalle. In 1922 Gustav Mayer published a selection of the correspondence of Marx and Lasalle in German. Economic questions are treated, and the contrast between the Sismondi-Malthus world of Lasalle and that of Marx could not be shown more graphically.
Aus dem literarischen Nachlass. Franz Mehring, Marx’s biographer, edited the literary remains of Marx and Engels culled from magazines and newspapers and revealing their opinions on a variety of subjects. There are few more significant records of universal interests than this compilation in four volumes (Stuttgart, 1913).
Gesammelte Schriften, 1852-1862 (edited by Ryazanov, Berlin 1917). This two-volume collection of everything written publicly by Marx and Engels after the Eighteenth Brumaire really only covers the period to 1856.
Karl Marx, Der dialektische Materialismus, die Frühschriften (edited by Landshut und Meyer, Berlin, 1932). A two-volume compilation of all the early pronouncements of Marx relating to dialectical materialism; an invaluable source-book for his ideas.
Marx und Engels über Historische Materialismus, Ein Quellenbuch. This superb two-volume critical compilation by Hermann Duncker, issued in Berlin (revised) in 1930, is a mine of excerpts on historical materialism and a crushing reply to those who hold that Marx’s reference to his historical method are merely in a few fugitive sentences.
Briefwechsel. The complete correspondence of Marx and Engels for forty years to the least fragment obtainable, has been published in German at Moscow by the Marx-Engels Institute in 12 volumes. Other compilations are the above-mentioned Lasalle correspondence, also included in the Literarischen Nachlass, and the Correspondence of Marx largely with two friends in America, Sorge and Dietzgen, issued in Stuttgart in 1906.
NOTE: Early works of Marx such as the Jewish Question and The Hegelian Philosophy of Law are in the Literarischen Nachlass. As all the economic and dialectical materialist and historical materialist early excerpts have been grouped as above cited, detailed comment is superfuous. Marx’s Address to the International (London, 1864) and his constitution are interesting but show his organizational power rather than economic theory. (Reprinted in Founding of the First International, New York.)
FREDERICK ENGELS. A great deal of Engels’s work consists of collaborations with Marx, his revelatory prefaces to Marx’s books (themselves independent classics) and his rewriting in large part of Volumes II and III of Capital (so as to connect the Marxian texts) and his reissues of pamphlets such as Wage-Labor and Capital, as the later Marx would have desired. We have cited his more significant primary works.
Anti-Dühring. The philosophical and economic classic of Marxism. It is Marxist Library No. 18, Marx helped in its writing and edited it. Its survey of dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and the outlines of Marxian political economy are a one-volume education in Marxism and worth a hundred minor books and expositions. It is a pity that he had to use the poor pedant he did as an illustration; a reduced edition of the book without reference to the lame ideas of Dühring might help with those who have a distaste for forgotten controversy. The extract (somewhere modified, and with a special introduction and supplement on The Mark) called Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, is the most popular Socialist pamphlet ever written outside the Communist Manifesto.
The Housing Question (Marxist Library No. 23). The attitude of Engels on the proposed housing reforms of the early seventies enabled the study of land-prices, the divorce of city and country, the swindling of workers by “own your own home” schemes, and the reproduction of slums constantly as class relations are renewed constantly, to be made topical and to serve as a concrete mode of apprehending Marxism.
Condition of the Working Class in England (Marxist Library No. 36). This astonishing book by a man of less than twenty-four showed that Engels, prior to his long association with Marx, must have independently grasped many of his controlling ideas. It really reduces the role that Sombart and others give Engels, as a mere disciple of the master. It is the classic indictment of the early factory system and was the foundation of the burning sections on the treatment of the worker in Marx’s Capital.
Germany, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Marxist Library No. 13). Signed by Marx, these articles that appeared in the New York Tribune are from the pen of Engels. They reveal the weaknesses of doctrinaire communism and socialism and are a superb anatomy of the vacillating bourgeois liberalism of Germany as opposed to the Western lands, a revelation still timely, as was shown by the anemic history of the Weimar Republic, 1918-33.
The Peasant War in Germany (Marxist Library No. 33). An attempt to extend historical materialism to a study of the Anabaptist insurrection of 1525; especially valuable for its study of Martin Luther. Engels was enamored of military history and had his chance here.
Ludwig Feuerbach (Marxist Library No. 15). A small book which gives Engels’s view of the transition of Hegelian thought in Marx into dialectical materialism with a reversal of the Hegelian concept of the mind and its role. Feuerbach was for a time idolized by Marx so that this is a valuable study of theoretical origins.5
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York, 1939). This new translation supersedes the older Kerr edition. It is the textbook of Marxians everywhere on primitive communism, the division of society into classes, the nature of the state, and the economic context of social institutions. Challenged as to details more than any other work of Engels, its central thesis, derived from the American Lewis H. Morgan, has suffered rather in chronological than logical sequence.
Capital (Marxist Library No. 34). Engels’s review of, summary of, glosses on, and controversies about the economic teachings of Marx’s Capital.
Engels’s Dialectics and Nature, with an introduction by J. B. S. Haldane, has just been issued in London.
Handbooks and Selections: Handbook of Marxism, edited by Emile Burns (New York, 1936). A series of carefully chosen extracts taking the apostolic succession down to Stalin, and revealing the continuum of the theory of Marxism in its economic, philosophical, historical, organizational aspects with sidelights on colonial history; etc.
Kark Marx Selected Works (edited by V. Adoratsky, New York, 1938). The first volume of this two-volume collection deals with political economy partly, the second does not.
Lee, Algernon (editor), Essentials of Marx; reprints most important pamphlets with critical introduction from Socialist Party viewpoint (New York, 1926).
NOTE: Since many of Marx’s articles were calmly printed as editorials written by themselves by the editors of the New York Tribune from 1851 to 1862, a part of his writings will always be in dispute. Engels wrote for the New American Cyclopaedia of George Ripley and Charles A. Dana and for the German Dictionary of Social Science. Undoubtedly the Moscow bibliographers will some day track down these important additions to Americana. The letters of Karl Marx and Engels to their American friends, hitherto available only in German, are being issued by the International Publishers, with some original material, as well.
BOOKS ON MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISM AS A WHOLE
Mehring, F., Karl Marx (New York). So much the first biography that it is a wonder why so many more are produced. Mehring was the cultural leader of German Socialism, and his book has a living quality that is lacking in other biographies. Subsequent research of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow may antiquate certain sections of the book, but it will always remain the classic biography.
Carr, E. H., Karl Marx.
Lenin, V. I., The Teachings of Karl Marx, New York. Part of the compilation, Marx-Engels-Marxism, this essay is specifically concerned with Marx’s life and his special contribution. It is one of those succinct essays like that of Lord Acton on German Schools of History that packs a lifetime into a few pages.
Riazanov, D., Marx and Engels (New York, 1927). Biography by the former director of the Marx-Engels Institute, considered by his successors to underrate the revolutionary content of their teachings.
Mayer, G., Frederick Engels (New York, 1937). Enjoys the same position with reference to Engels that Mehring does to Marx. Mayer is a good stylist as well as scholar.
B. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx (New York, 1937). This recent biography, with a good iconography, is found scattered in all secondhand stores. A good literary summary but more eloquent than profound. It has no errors of fact.
Otto Rühle, Karl Marx (New York, 1929). An attempt to create a full-length “psychograph” of Marx largely on a physiological basis. Written by a veteran of proletarian pictorial literature, it is a medical plus Freudian plus Sunday supplement interpretation of Marx’s life, albeit of a professed admirer. Follows the hideous precedent of Prinz and Sombart on “compensatory” needs of Marx to elaborate his theory. To be read with great caution, and, on the whole, rejected.
Loria, Achille, Karl Marx (New York, 1920). A charlatan’s gem, interesting as an attempt to expiate his insults to Marx on the appearance of Vol. III of Capital.
Spargo, John, Karl Marx, Life and Work (New York, 1910). The largest American biography. Converts Marx into something like a “gentleman,” and this is really too bad. Inadequately documented, and vitiated by a purely reformist attitude.
Beer, M., Life and Teachings of Karl Marx (Boston, 1924). As good a one-volume quick summary as could be desired; intellectual integrity and competence are manifest.
Laski, H. J., Karl Marx. A polished but doubtful exposition by a man much greater than this book.
Korsch, Karl, Karl Marx (London, 1938). The most up-to-date summary, written in a philosophical style with proper emphasis on the development of Marx’s ideas; somewhat over-formal on political theory.
Sprigge, J. S., Karl Marx (London, 1938). Small, serviceable manual by an admiring disciple.
BIBLIOGRAPHY ON MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY
Böhm-Bawerk, E. V., Capital and Interest (London, 1890).
Böhm-Bawerk, E. V., Positive Theory of Capital (London, 1891; New York, 1923).
Böhm-Bawerk, E. V., Recent Literature on Interest (New York, 1903).
Böhm-Bawerk, E. V., Karl Marx and the Close of His System (New York, 1898).
Böhm-Bawerk, E. V., Karl Marx and the Close of His System (New York, 1898).
These works of the celebrated Austrian economist, E. V. Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), are the most important critical attacks on Marxian economic theory.
Hilferding, R., Böhm-Bawerk’s Marx-Kritik (German) (Vienna, 1904).
Hilferding, R., Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx (Glasgow, 1920). The celebrated reply of Hilferding to Böhm-Bawerk, certainly the best Marxian reply, is given in German here as I have failed to find a copy of the English translation in any New York library.
Boudin, L. B., The Theoretical System of Karl Marx (Chicago, 1907).
Kuczynski, J., Zurück zu Marx (German) (Leipzig, 1926). These are the two best general defenses of Marxian economic theory against the totality of critics on the bourgeois and revisionist sides both.
Joseph, H. W. B., The Labor Theory of Value in Karl Marx (London, 1923).
Lindsay, A. D., Karl Marx’s Capital (London, 1925).
Two scholastic accounts, Joseph supercilious, Lindsay critical but sympathetic; both based on Idealist approaches.
Simkhovich, V. G., Marxism vs. Socialism (New York, 1913; subsequent editions). A sort of omnibus of all the revisionist objections to Marx.
Skelton, O. D., Socialism (Boston, 1913). A somewhat too assured and “slick” but unquestionably competent examination of Marxian theory; useful rather for the state of mind it represents and for its thorough preparation than for originality. The best American (really Canadian) hostile examination.
Sachs, A. S., Basic Principles of Scientific Socialism (New York, 1923). A recapitulation of Marx, apparently a popularization, but full of unexpected and helpful aids to the serious beginner.
Laidler, H. W., History of Socialist Thought (New York, 1927). A popular illustrated history of Socialist doctrines, much too summary (of necessity), due to its compression, on economic theory. From my point of view, fluctuating in its statement of Marxian doctrine.
Bernstein, E., Evolutionary Socialism (London, 1909). The classic of Revisionism; somewhat dated.
Grossmann, Henryk, Das Akkumulation und Zusammenbruchgesetz des kapitalistischen Systems (Leipzig, 1929—German). Whatever may be thought of Grossmann’s accumulation theory, it is the most complete documentation extant of the debates on Marxian accumulation and crisis theory, and the most elaborate reply to Luxemburg.
Luxemburg, Rosa, Das Akkumulation des Kapitals (Berlin, 1913—German). The most celebrated attempt made to refute the Marxian notion that extended reproduction was possible in a closed capitalist economy.
Lenin, V. I., Imperialism.6 A masterly summary of the viewpoint that monopoly capitalism and the fusion of industrial and finance capital have created a new situation, characteristic of the present age and requiring a special application of Marxian analysis.
Bukharin, N., The Political Economy of the Leisure Class (New York, 1927). An attempt to turn the tables on the Austrian school by examining their theory from the Marxian viewpoint. Adds little to the bourgeois criticisms of von Bortkiewicz and the Marxian of Hilferding, but is sprightly, learned, and scholastically adept.
Hilferding, R., Das Finanzkapital (Vienna, 1910—German). Whatever differences may exist on theory, the most complete Marxian study of finance capital in the post-Marxian period.
Muhs, K., Anti-Marx (Jena, 1927—German). The arsenal of all anti-Marxist arguments, in strange disarray and with little logical cohesion.
Tugan-Baranowski, Modern Socialism and Its Historical Development, (London, 1910). The most adroit economic criticism of Marxism after Böhm-Bawerk, Tugan-Baranowski is a compound of revisionist and renegade from Marxism; on the economic side he is what Werner Sombart is on the social, historical, and philosophical.
Halbwachs, M., La Classe ouvrière et son niveau de vie (Paris, 1913— French). An attempt to give concrete value to the idea of the reproducible value of labor-power. Not Marxian but Durkheimist. Challenging.
Diehl, Karl, Über Sozialismus, Kommunismus, Anarchismus (Berlin, 1922—German). A comprehensive anthology and review, Marxian included, by the dean of anti-Marxian academic critics in Germany.
Sombart, W., Das proletarische Sozialismus (2 volumes, Berlin, 1924—German). This later edition of the classic work, Socialism and the Social Movement, of Werner Sombart is far and away the most important attack ever made on the whole system of Marxism, philosophical and economic alike. Although Sombart was inspired as an economic historian by Marx, here he turns renegade. He refuses to examine Marx’s specific economic doctrines, as he once did so brilliantly, for he holds its every assumption invalidated methodologically. Nevertheless his implicit criticism testifies to a lifelong experience.
The book is marred by some cunning deliberate misstatements, obvious senile manias, and the determination to execute the victim be the facts what they may. Sombart especially considers the capitalist system as a temporary plunder of man’s stored-up resources and foresees a lower level of material culture that must exclude the historic aims of any Socialist system. Denies the entire historical-economic thesis of Marx and Engels. A detailed reply is made especially on the question of economic-historical method by J. Kuczynski in the fourth section of Zurück zu Marx.
Hirsch, M., Democracy vs. Socialism (New York, 1901). Omnibus of single-tax objections to Marxian analysis.
Dichl, K., Die Grundrententheorie in ok. Syst. v. Karl Marx (Conrad’s Jahrbücher, Vol. 72, 1899—German). Examines Marx’s theory of absolute and differential rent with marked skepticism.
Dobb, Maurice, Wages (Cambridge University Press). Marxian exposition. Compact, helpful, adapted to students.
Dobb, Maurice, Political Economy and Capitalism (New York, 1939). The best Marxian examination of the present position of political economy.
Strachey, John, Nature of Capitalist Crisis (New York, 1935). Theory and Practise of Socialism (New York, 1936). Two Marxian studies, the first a critical examination of theories of crises of leading circulation schools, together with an exposition of the pre-monopoly theory of crises, the latter an elementary rearrangement of Marxian thought without an overemphasis on detailed economic content in Marx. Both helpful, and despite much criticism from Marxian sources, they are on the whole among the most successful popularizations extant in English. Strachey’s expository gifts are unusual. They lack a philosophical content, and in this they are not much superior to such documents as Leontiev.
Leontiev, A., Political Economy. An exposition of Marxian doctrine, mouthpiece of the Communist Party and long an official textbook. Mingles present party issues with much eloquence and constant repetition with a letter-perfect reproduction of every previous party textbook. Will probably soon be retired, as it is written in a style incomprehensible to Americans and contains minor inaccuracies on Marxian economic theory.
Segal, L., Principes d’économie politique (Paris, 1936—French). Used by the French- and German-speaking Communist parties. On a wholly different plane from Leontiev, it is remarkably arranged, shirks no question, makes no errors in exposition, and is distinctly a fine intellectual performance. It remains a mystery why it has not been translated into English.
Kuczynski, J., New Fashions in Wages Theory (New York, 1938). Labor Conditions in Western Europe (New York, 1937). Hunger and Work (New York, 1938). These three works by the foremost Marxian statistician deal with the theory of increasing misery, the areas of employment utilized by given capitals, a really trenchant attack on Rueff and Keynes among wage theorists from the strict Marxian viewpoint, a study of American unproductivity that may actually extend Marxian analysis.
Political Economy in Twelve Lessons (Marxian, New York, circa 1933). Adapted from the German of Duncker for British use and issued about 1933; despite the political “dating” of associated chapters, remains, as a totality, the best popular exposition of Marxian economic theory in English. It is German in method, though, and this may make its treatment difficult for American students, but it must be read.
Cole, G. D. H., What Marx Really Meant (New York, 1935). An attempt to align Marxian thinking in economics with what Cole fancies as a more modern approach. A tissue of distortions and errors.
Lenin, V. I., Marx-Engels-Marxism. Among these excerpts is the priceless encyclopedia article on Karl Marx, and every other single contribution of Lenin directly concerned with Marxian and Engelsian doctrine; full of economic commentaries. The wisest and most inspiring study since Marx.
Lenin, V. I., “Agriculture,” etc., in Vol. IV of Collected Works. The examination of absolute and differential rent, especially of Bulgakov and of the methods of David and the Revisionists, is especially valuable for training in economic and statistical co-ordination.
Varga, E., The Economy of Capitalism in the Period of Stabilization (London, 1928). The Great Crisis (New York, 1935). Two Systems (New York, 1939). Three attempts to align Marxian theory with the concrete developments of present-day monopoly and Fascist capitalism. The theoretical extension of Marx and Lenin is slight, except for the formulation of the peculiarities of the crisis of 1929 as a cyclical phase in a general crisis, and for the distortions in price structure of monopoly capitalism, as leading to differing fiscal expedients from previous crises. The statistical apparatus appears well organized, though sometimes naïve. Varga is not taken quite so much at the valuation he is supposed to enjoy abroad, by Marxian academicians in Moscow, but there are no better books available on the subject he has undertaken, and his studies must stand until some higher talent arises. He has himself evolved and transcended many formalist errors contained in his previous works.
Burns, Emile, The Only Way Out (London, 1933). Money (London, 1938). Joys to the reader, for their limpid prose, brevity, educational quality, exactness. Perhaps the two best essays to make students actually enjoy Marxism.
Huberman, Leo, Man’s Worldly Goods (New York, 1937). The American Burns, racy, witty, clear. His chapter on primitive accumulation, “where the money came from,” is delightful.
Corey, Lewis, The Decline of American Capitalism (New York, 1934). The Crisis of the Middle Class (New York, 1935). The former is the most comprehensive attempt ever made to link Marxian presuppositions with the present American capitalist situation and the latter an attempt to break down the amorphous concept of the “middle class.” The theory of the exhaustion of long-term factors is not Marxian; the book as a whole impresses rather by its marshaling of data than by its theoretical appositeness. In the middle-class study, a somewhat too rigorous Jeremiad is sustained; it is, so to speak, a hyper-Marxism rather than Marxism, Corey employs. Were he to rearrange his theoretical study and group the facts in that changed setting his two books could become extremely valuable for the American scene. Corey also suffers from the desire to bring down his capitalist flock of birds with every kind of statistical shot in his lockers, but some do not fit the Marxian rifles.
Croce, B., Marxian Economics and Historical Materialism (New York, 1914). An attempt by the greatest living Italian philosopher to give the significance of the Marxian economic categories in a wider setting. Here the question is philosophical: if one accepts Croce’s philosophy, his study of the theory of value is illuminating; if not, not.
Adler, G., Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx’schen kritik der bestehenden Volkswirtschaft (Tubingen, 1887, 2d edition 1917—German). Vigorous vindication of Marx’s critical examination of Capitalism and a good reply to the earlier strictures of the Austrian school.
Slonimiski, L., Versuch einer Kritik der Karl Marx’schen ökonomische Theorien (Berlin, 1899—German). An extremely hostile criticism of every single Marxian economic concept, in a breezy journalistic style.
Fischer, Paul, Der Marx’sche Werttheorie (Berlin, 1899—German). Elaborate and reiterated formal analysis of every quirk in Marx’s deductions of totality of value and individual commodity analysis.
Hammacher, Das philosophisch-ökonomische System des Marxismus (Leipzig, 1910—German). This enormous book is referred to respectfully by all Marxian bibliographers, I have read it carefully for light as to the inner connection of Marxian concrete economic ideas and philosophical assumptions and found it thin in tissue. It is its excellently arranged, numerous citations that must be the cause of its universal celebrity. It is a repertoire and nothing else.
Kautsky, Karl, The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (London, 1925). This translation of a popular manual by the old high priest of Marxism is serviceable for it is an excellent guide to Volume I of Capital and the average rate of profit theory in Volume III.
Bernstein, E., Die ökonomische Lehre von Marx, der III Band des Kapitals (Berlin, 1902—German). The Revisionist attempt to state that the third volume of Marx and the average rate of profits theory is a “correction” of the immature assumptions of the first volume, which had explained little correctly.
Riekes, Hugo, Wert und Tauschwert (1899—German). A hostile examination of Marx’s distinction between value and exchange value by a believer in subjective utility theories.
Von Bortkiewicz, L., Wertrechnung und Preisrechnung in Marx’schen System (Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft, 1907—German). The most fertile writer on economics in Germany attempts to break down the Marxian distinction between quantity of value and its realization in variable prices. Von Bortkiewicz does not accept the Austrian critique and his little essay should be read by Marxians who know German, so as to sharpen their theoretical teeth. His wonderful essay on the cardinal error of Böhm-Bawerk’s interest theory is also helpful since it contains the implied vindication of Marx against the reproach that he insisted that labor be paid in the present for goods that will be realized in the future.
Von Buch, Leo, Über die Elemente der politischen Ökonomie. Die Intensität der Arbeit, Wert und Preis (1907?—German). An attempt to indicate the discrepancies between Marxian time reckoning as a social quantity, and the subsequent quantity of value and its price reflection. I have looked at it hastily; it seems to contain little that is not in von Bortkiewicz and Böhm-Bawerk.
Cathrein, V., Socialism (New York, 1904). The only large Jesuit study. Hostile. Eclectic in method, and in economic criticism, which is much weaker than the scholastic ethical study where it is much more difficult to come to an issue on facts.
Le Rossignol, J. E., Orthodox Socialism (New York, 1907). For a long time the principal American criticism of Socialism; still used somewhat as a textbook. Contains nothing that is not better stated in O. D. Skelton on Socialism.
Aveling, E., The Student’s Marx. A summary of the first volume of Capital by Marx’s son-in-law.
Emmet, W. H., Marxian Economic Handbook (London, 1923). Far better than Aveling; altogether the most detailed, exact, pernickety, but invaluable summary of Volume I of Capital. Emmet is a true scholastic disciple, the perfect commentator. His book is an exercise in the delicate refinements of Marxian statement, and woe to the most minute error! He delights in catching up with a host of minor deviations by celebrated Marxians. Full of individual flavor: Mr. Pickwick endowed with a first-rate mind and turned Marxian. My indebtedness to it is large.
Hyndman, H. M., Economics of Socialism (London, 1909). An attempt to explain Marxism by a man who led the so-called Marxian socialist movement in England for two generations. It is inexact and misleading but a vigorous economic-journalistic job. It was used seriously as a Marxian source by Professor Henry Clay.
Untermann, E., Marxian Economics (Chicago, 1907). An exposition by the translator of Marx’s three volumes of Capital and a philosophical disciple of Dietzgen. Chunky, fairly unreadable, and surprisingly muddled.
Spann, Othmar, Haupttheorien der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Vienna, 1911—German; History of Economics, New York, 1930). A critique by the leader of the organic school, which originally sponsored something like the Fascist theory of economic organization. Full of actual misstatements of the Marxian position. Treated fully in the text (critical section, above). Like Willbrandt, he holds that every idea of Marx is wrong, and none is original. Marx was an amazing Calvinist specimen: God blasted him from birth with two scars, one that he could chance on no idea in any field that could possibly be right, and secondly that he could not even originate these infallibly wrong ideas but must steal only the left-handed ones from everybody else. For all that, like Satan, he can tempt tens of millions, although himself the incarnation of sin and error. This solemn nonsense found an American translator and publisher!
Dobb, Maurice, Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress (London, 1925). The best one-volume Marxian study of capitalist evolution.
Liefmann, R., Geschichte und Kritik des Sozialismus (second edition, Leipzig, 1923—German). Since Böhm-Bawerk no criticism of Marx from the viewpoint of the subjective value school has rivaled this work for scope and sharpness. Liefmann is an authority on structural organization in economic society and is the one exponent of the Austrian school fully aware of the need for economic analysis in terms of the present economic system, as given, apart from purely analytical constructions.
Weber, Max, Der Sozialismus (Vienna, 1918—German). Max Weber, in the words of his disciple, Palyi, is the one bourgeois economist of the twentieth century with a fundamentally new economic contribution and the only critic of Marxian economics in a new mold. His general psychic and social theory is invoked. Stimulating, and compels the Marxian defense to probe more deeply into its own assumptions in order to refute the novel objections of Weber. The works of Max Weber cannot be considered here, for they constitute the only systematic non-Marxian system of economic reference in this century. (American “institutionalism” is not as yet integrated.)
Cassel, G., Sozialismus oder Fortschritt (Berlin, 1929—German). A critique of Marxian economics from the viewpoint of a denial of the validity of the value concept. Cassel represents the group for whom empirical price relations are the proper weapons of economic exploration. His theory of age composition, too, affects his investment concepts. A highly fashionable economist, his vogue is just beginning to pass away.
Pohle, Ludwig, Kapitalismus und Sozialismus (Berlin, 1931—German). The leading general criticism of socialism now current in Europe to replace the older viewpoints of Dichl and Liefmann. Not very original.
Sorel, Georges, La décomposition du Marxisme (Paris, 1910). The so-called Syndicalist criticism of Marxian economic theory, hailed for its originality. I have read it with that hope, twice, and have found that apart from gaseous philosophical inflation, there is practically no serious direct criticism of any given Marxian economic concept. Interesting rather as the type of editorial economic writing that made Mussolini so celebrated a polemist, capable of all sorts of ambiguous reference.
Michels, Robert, Der Verelendungstheorie (Leipzig, 1928—German). A criticism of Marx’s increasing-misery hypothesis as a conceptualization. More will be heard of this book later on, as my instinct for publicity tells me that Michels is due for exploitation as the post-Marxian philosopher to succeed the Pareto and Cassel fashions.
Charasoff, G., Das System der Marxismus (Berlin, 1910). Perhaps the best all-around general summary of Marxian economic theory in its relation, point by point, to the whole body of the Marxian doctrine.
Goldschied, Rudolf, Verelendungstheorie oder Meliorationstheorie (1901?). See chapter on Revisionism for résumé of its clever thesis.
Guyot, Yves, Socialistic Fallacies (New York, 1910). Yves Guyot was French Finance Minister and founder of the most celebrated stock exchange gazette in continental Europe, the Agence Économique et Financière. Apart from a subtle, but hopelessly inaccurate, denunciation of the constant capital substitution for living labor, it is amateurish.
Bounatian, G., Wirtschaftskrisen und Überkapitalismus (Munich, 1908—German). A tremendously documented attempt to study the exact distortions in crises resulting from the interplay of monopoly capitalism with vestiges of older capitalism.
Grigorivici, Tatiana, Die Wertlehre von Marx und Lasalle (Vienna, 1910—German). The most detailed study ever made of Marx’s value theories, and by reason of its apposition with that of Lasalle, extremely instructive, especially for isolating the Marxian doctrines against those commonly assimilated to it.
Borchardt, Julian, La Monnaie d’après Marx (French). This study in the 1897 Annales de l’Institut des Sciences Sociales is one of the few valuable contributions to Marxian monetary theory. Borchardt is a well-grounded Marxian, capable of some strange flights, but this essay is in one of his better moods.
Von Bortkievicz, L., Die Robertus’sche Grundrententheorie und die Marxistische Lehre von der absoluten Grundrententheorie (German). (In Archiv f. Gesch. des Socialismus, etc., Volume I, 1910). An excellent exposition of the differences between Marx and Rodbertus in rent theory, and one that should stop their being identified so easily in encyclopedia articles.
Spitz, Philip, Das Problem der allgemeinen Grundrenttheorie bei Ricardo, Rodbertus und Marx. (German—in Jahrbücher f. Nationalök. und Statistik, Volume CVI, 1916). Perhaps the best account of Ricardian rent theory and its influence on Socialist constructions.
Cornélissen, Théorie de la valeur avec une réfutation des théories de Rodbertus, Karl Marx, Stanley Jevons et Böhm-Bawerk (second edition, Paris, 1913—French). Universal massacre of Marxians and Austrians alike. (Not consulted; only reviews read.)
Gonner, E. C. K., Social Philosophy of Rodbertus (London, 1899). The great authority on Ricardo turns to Rodbertus and sympathizes somewhat with the idea that Marx was indebted to him and that Engels has not wholly refuted that charge. If Professor Gonner would have read the appropriate sections of Marx, his book would have benefited. His version of rent differences leaves much to be desired.
Adler, Dr. Karl, Kapitalzins und Preisbewegung (German).
Kulla, J. R., Die geschichtliche Entwickelung der modernen Werttheorien (German). Gives the sources of both Marxian and Austrian theory of values, along with several others
MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY—ORIGINS
Marx, Karl, Theorien über der Mehrwert (edited by K. Kautsky, Stuttgart). (French translation: Histoire des doctrines économiques, Paris.)
Gide and Rist, History of Economic Doctrines (London, 1923). Still the best bourgeois guide and useful for its summaries of French thought, especially of Sismondi and the Utopians.
Haney, L. H., History of Economic Thought (New York, 1911, and subsequent edition). Most widespread American history. Shows great admiration for Marx but his restatement of his doctrine and some predecessors cannot but be considered somewhat personal.
Beer, Max, Allegemeine Geschichte des Sozialismus und der sozialen Kämpfe (sixth edition, Berlin, 1929—German). (An excellent translation has been made by H. J. Stenning, London, 1922-5.) The best comprehensive history of all Socialist origins, including the specific doctrines of Marx.
Hector, Denis, Histoire des doctrines économiques et socialistes (Paris, 1904. 1907—French). Good two-volume study of Marxian origins in the setting of bourgeois economic theory.
Lowenthal, E., The Ricardian Socialists (New York, Columbia University, 1911). Indispensable study of Ricardo’s nemesis in the shape of the logical extension of his doctrines to socialist deductions.
Brisbane, Albert, Social Destiny of Man (Philadelphia, 1840). Fourierist system by an American, later friend of Marx, and father of celebrated journalist, Arthur Brisbane.
Bourguin, M., Les systèmes socialistes (Paris, 1904—French). Examines pre-Marxian and Marxian theories; hostile, competent.
Warren, Josiah, Equitable Commerce (New Harmony, 1846). Original book by an American “anarchist” who discovered independently all that was significant in Proudhon, and whose idea that cost is a time-equation in labor bears a superficial resemblance to oversimplified Marxism. Valuable for American students as showing indigenous socialist critique. His disciple, S. P. Andrews (Science of Society, 1843), universalized his system; also in Cost, the Limit of Price, 1853).
Turgeon, C. et C. H., La Valeur d’après les économistes anglais et français (third edition, Paris, 1925—French). Gives historical sources of Marxian value concepts by the most celebrated adversary of Marx’s historical materialism.
Higgs, Henry, The Physiocrats (London, 1897). This little and masterly essay is still the best English study of the most remarkable synthetic school political economy had produced, outside the Marxian.
Oncken, A., Geschichte der Nationalökonomie, I (German). Remains the best documented history of definite economic ideas, such as were utilized by Marx in his work.
Cannan, Edwin, History of Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy (third edition, London, 1917). This long title is the most critical account of Smith and Ricardo and is useful for correcting Gonner and vindicating the more usual appraisal of Ricardo’s value-profit theory.
Whittaker, A. C., History and Criticism of the Labor Theory of Value (New York, Columbia University Press, 1904). The best summary in English of the controversy but not significant with respect to the Marxian distinctions.
Menger, A., Right to the Whole Produce of Labor (London, 1889). This is the universally used manual of the origins of the specific economic-socialist ideas of Marx, especially the English sources. Its introduction by Prof. Foxwell is a classic. For all that, it should be used cautiously and Bernstein is right in his indignation at the amazingly superficial mode of interpretation with respect to surplus-value. In some respects actually false and misleading. The high reputation of Menger has shielded it from proper appraisal.
Proudhon, P. J., Complete Works (issued in 20 volumes, Paris, 1935). Of these the three that even the most adventurous student need glance over are, Idée générale de la révolution, Systèmes des Contradictions économiques, Philosophie de la misère (the last the chopping block of Karl Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy). (All French.)
Hertzler, J. O., History of Utopian Thought (New York, 1926). Best account in English of actual theories of Utopians, though a Marxian would dissent from a fair number of deductions.
Steuart, Sir J., Enquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767). A predecessor admired by Engels and who popularized the term “political economy.”
Roberts, Hazel, Boisguilbert (Columbia University, New York, 1935). Balanced study of the thinker who, Marx held, founded rent theory.
A la lumière du Marxisme (Volume II, Paris, 1937). A collection of significant writings by French savants dealing with the specific contributions of Utopians and Positivists to the Marxian thinking; economic theories cited in part.
Cuvillier, Armand, Proudhon (Paris, 1936—French). Definitive Marxian study of Proudhon. Supersedes all others.
Armand, F., et R. Maublanc, Fourier (2 vols., Paris, 1936—French). Best study of Fourier; not only a restatement of his astonishing critique of production and distribution but beautifully written as well.
Baby, Jean, Les précurseurs du Communisme (Paris, 1936—French). The best authoritative and compact summary of the economic ideas later crystallized in Karl Marx.
Cornu, Augustin, Karl Marx (Paris, 1934—French). Although the title is comprehensive, this book is limited to the early ideas of Marx and happily blends his philosophical and economic origins; a model of scholarship and insight.
Bonar, J., Philosophy and Political Economy (New York, 1893). Deals with Proudhon, Marx, and Lasalle. Useful for showing philosophical ideas as implicit in all concrete economic doctrines, despite disavowals.
Bray, J. H., Labor’s Wrongs and Labor’s Remedies (London, 1839). A post-Ricardian Socialist whose influence on Marx is overestimated by most commentators.
Considérant, V., Destinée sociale (Paris, 1836—French). A book that influenced French Utopian socialism and hardened some hitherto amorphous economic ideas. Outrageously overrated as a Marxian source by the anarchist W. Tcherkessof.
Guthrie, W. D., Socialism before the French Revolution (New York, 1907). Takes up Mably, Morelly, Meslier, etc.; although its theses are curiously stated, is useful for the antecedents of Babeuf.
Behrens, L. H., The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth (London, 1904). A neglected and tremendously important study of the most significant predecessor of modern socialism, Gerrard Winstanley (circa 1650). Written by a single-taxer, it nevertheless shows, in its summaries, the extent to which Winstanley even anticipated specific ideas such as those of Lenin in The State and Revolution. A historic freak. The expositions of Winstanley in the more highly regarded History of Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century of Gooch are far inferior in understanding to Behrens.
Podmore, F., Robert Owen (London, 1906). The authoritative life of Owen. Despite its bulk, flabby.
Andler, Charles, Le Manifeste Communiste (2 vols., Paris, 1910, 2nd edition—French). Although written by a non-Socialist this is the most critical and thorough account of the actual origin of every single notion in the Communist Manifesto. Brushes away fat cobwebs of conjecture.
Bouglé, C., Les Socialismes français (Paris, series Armand Colin—French). A critical examination of pre-Marxian economic concepts from the strict viewpoint of the school of Emile Durkheim, and the “Année Sociologique” group. Superficial on value theory, despite the true intellectual eminence of its author.
Pareto, V., Les Systèmes Socialistes (Paris—French). A discursive organic study of various economic theories of socialism, including pre-Marxian, by a much gazetted economist and philosopher, recently re-established à la mode.
Fouillée, Alfred, Socialisme et la sociologie réformiste (1910—French). Used for a long time by Felix Adler as the Bible of Socialist criticism (especially of origins) at Columbia University. Requires the same idealist act of faith as most books of its genre.
Bernstein, E., Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Sozialismus (Berlin, 1901—German). A splendidly documented account of economic theories leading to Marx, given in correct filiation. Bernstein’s fame may survive more on account of this book than because of his Revisionism.
Charléty, S., Histoire du Saint-Simonisme (Paris, 1896—French). A solid, excellent account of every current—economic, social, and mystical-in Saint-Simon’s contribution. The writer is now head of the University of Paris.
Aftalion, Albert, L’œuvre économique de S. de Sismondi (Paris, 1899—French). Best common-sense history of his special doctrines.
Grossman, Henryk, S. de Sismondi et ses théories économiques (Warsaw, 1924—French). Brilliant study of the astonishing continuity of Sismondi’s underconsumptionism and its Protean forms down to our time.
Taun, Mao-Lin, Sismonde de Sismondi as an Economist (New York, Columbia University, 1927). Thesis by a Chinese scholar; the only English study.
ON HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM:
NOTE: Although this book is concerned primarily with Marxian economic theory, that is so interwoven with these two other threads that the student is entitled to a guide to the literature on the related subjects.
Masaryk, T. G., Die philosophischen und soziologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus (1899—German). A comprehensive but not very profound study of Marxian philosophy by the distinguished liberator of Czechoslovakia.
Cunow, H., Die Marx’sche Geschichts, Gesellschafts und Staatstheorie (2 vols., 1922—German). Most erudite and elaborate analysis of the Marxian theory of the nature of society, history, and the State. Strongly contested as to conclusions by the followers of V. I. Lenin.
Lenin, V. I., Materialism and Empiriocriticism (New York, 1927). The greatest Marxian attack on idealism and “phenomenalism”; obscurely translated, so that a new edition is being prepared. It is the Bible of the philosophical Leninist school. It must be read carefully, for it is embedded in topical references and is sharply controversial.
Lenin, V. I., The State and Revolution. Perhaps the most important political pamphlet written since the Communist Manifesto. Draws on Marx’s notes on the Gotha Program, and Engels’s closing reflections in Origin of the Family . . ., as also in The Civil War in France, so as to build up a dynamic interpretation of the State.
Woltmann, L., Der historische Materialismus (Berlin, 1900—German). A Kantian attack on Marx’s inverted Hegelianism. By an acrid but profound scholar, later lost in a maze of exaggerated nationalist thinking, and who died quite young.
Plenge, Johann, Hegel und Marx (Berlin, 1911—German). The most valuable study of the philosophical filiation of Marx but hostile and in some respects quite vicious.
Lukacs, George, Geschichte und Klassbewustsein (Berlin, 1923—German). By far the most audacious and critical effort to place the theory of class consciousness in the forefront of history, to explain its mechanics, and to identify its relationships exactly.
Labriola, Antonio, Socialism and Philosophy (Chicago, 1904). One of the rare manuals available in English which deals with the philosophical critics of Marx and replies in detail. (Pre-Leninist.)
Plechanov, George, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (New York, 1933). A series of essays by the leading Marxian philosopher prior to Lenin and which are models of concrete application.
Adoratsky, V., Dialectical Materialism (New York, 1937). A small manual, somewhat too drily stated, but useful to beginners. Adoratsky is a deep scholar who tries to “write down” consciously as though afraid that the exposition of the intricate matters at issue might dull the general thesis.7
Stammler, R., Wirtschaft und Recht (Leipzig, 1896—German). As important a negative examination of historical materialism as Böhm-Bawerk on Marxian economics; it is, in fact, the classic counter-thesis. Stammler holds that the legal framework of society is central for economic concepts. Lenin and Plechanov, though dissenting, were stimulated by his opposition. His second book, Materialistische Geschichtsaufassung (1921), generalizes his position on Marxism.
Seligman, E. R. A., The Economic Interpretation of History (original edition, New York, 1903). The earliest American examination of the Marxian historical thesis, well documented; repeats all the usual cultural objections to the doctrine. Seligman, here as everywhere, is the polyhistor, the academic authority vibrant. I did not find it especially important, though.
Rogers, Thorold, The Economic Interpretation of History (London, 1885). The earliest attempt at a non-Marxian economic interpretation, full of unproved and theatrical statements, but a well of inspiration.
Lenz, F., Staat und Marxismus (Berlin—not read).
Sorel, Georges, Reflexions sur la violence (Paris, 1910—French).
Berth, Eduard, La Fin d’une culture (Paris, 1910-French). Sorel and Berth hold the “mythological” and “Bergsonian” variant of proletarian historical motion. Berth is a literary master as Sorel a political talent; their examination of Marxian postulates is hurried and hysterical. The replies of Charles Rappaport on “Déterminisme historique” based on the philosophy of Pierre Lavroff, a Russian correspondent of Marx, are themselves dubious as Marxism. The state of the controversy showed the comparative “literary” quality of French Socialism, and led to the formation of the present critical school.
Von Mises, L., Die Gemeinwirtschaft (Berlin, 1922—German; translated as Socialism London). Dr. von Mises directs his batteries of heavy artillery against the historical materialist basis of Marxism, thence to derived economics, and finally to the annihilation of present collective economy in Russia. Altogether a complete military campaign.
Kautsky, Karl, Die Marxistische Staatsauffassung (Berlin, 1923—German). An attempt to integrate Marxian teaching on the state, as opposed to the derivations of Lenin.
Oppenheimer, Franz, Kapitalismus, Kommunismus, Wissenschaftliche Sozialismus (Berlin, 1919—German). The usual ethical, sociological, and single-tax analysis of the author, carried out systematically.
Delevski, J., Antagonismes sociaux et antagonismes prolétaires (Paris, 1924—French). A non-Marxian attempt to analyze the theory of society as split up into whole groups of antagonistic elements by the system of private ownership of the social means of production.
Robbins, L. C., Economic Basis of Class Conflict (New York, 1939).
Kautsky, Karl, The Class Struggle (Chicago, 1910).
Kautsky, Karl, Ethics and the Materialist Interpretation of History (Chicago, 1906). Two classics of Marxian exposition: well worth study and not dated.
Lowie, R. H., Origin of the State (New York, 1927). A reappraisal of Morgan’s and Engels’s central hypothesis of ethnological evolution; the results are not so divergent as they appear at first to be.
Brameld, Theodore B., A Philosophic Approach to Communism (University of Chicago, 1931). A scholarly attempt to reduce ambiguities in Marxian and Leninist philosophical assumptions, somewhat inconclusive but sincere.
Stalin, Joseph, Foundations of Leninism (New York, 1932). Problems of Leninism (New York, 1932). A wide range of essays and discourses reappraising the national and historical content of Marxism in our time, and bearing the impress of a man who deals with challenging realities at every moment. The study of nationalities is a remarkable expansion of Engels.
Hook, Sidney, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (New York, 1933). The leading “activist” study of Dialectical Materialism, the essence of which is conveyed in his article on the same subject in the New Encyclopaedia of Social Science. Disregards the centrality of the labor-time theory of value. It should be consulted in connection with the elaborate reviews of V. J. Jerome and E. Browder in The Communist (1933). No compromise is possible between these views and those of Hook, especially as he divides natural from social science.
Turgeon, Charles, Essais dans le materialisme historique (Paris, 1929—French). Perhaps the most tenacious and detailed reply to Historical Materialism. The inch-by-inch battle Turgeon conducts against Marx’s interpretations of the 1848 struggles in France is itself a veritable barricade war.
De Man, Henri, Psychology of Socialism (in French, Au-dela du Marxisme). An attempt to “bourgeoisify” and psychologize Marxism by the Belgian Finance Minister. Why it is celebrated is a mystery to me.
Veblen, Thorstein, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (New York, 1919). Contains the classic study of Socialist economics of Karl Marx that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Holds Marxian economic doctrine to be the most logical known but regards its philosophical and psychological tenets as archaic.
Portus, G. W., Marx and Modern Thought (Sydney, Australia—W. E. A. Series). The best eclectic manual in English of the total system of Marx; quite a pity that it is available only in Australia and England.
Briffault, Robert, The Mothers (3 volumes, London, 1927). Anthropological broadsides to vindicate the Morgan-Engels philosophy of the family.
Paul, William, The State (Glasgow, 1920). The Marxian idea of the state and society as seen through the spectacles of the followers of Daniel de Leon.
Passow, Richard, Kapitalismus (2nd edition, 1927—German). A terminological essay on the concept “capitalism” and an appraisal of the economic significance of varied interpretations.
Sauerland, Kurt, Der dialektische Materialismus (Volume I, Berlin, 1932—German). The beginning of an encyclopedic attempt to examine the minutiae of Marx’s philosophy of history and nature, since interrupted.
Troeltsch, Ernest, Gesammelte Schriften (pp. 314-371, “Marxistische Dialektik,” Tubingen, 1922—German). Considered in some philosophical circles as the most profound evaluation of the Marxian doctrine; Idealist.
Kautsky, Karl, Der materialistische Geschichtsaufassung (2 vols., Berlin, 1927—German). Extensive swan-song of the once greatest of Marxians; the bitter and vigorous review of Karl Korsch in Archive für Geschichte der Sozialismus (1929) is required reading in connection therewith.
Kautsky, Karl, Vermehrung und Entwickelung in Natur und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1901—German). Adapts evolutionary processes to dialectical materialism.
Korsch, Karl, Marxismus und Philosophie (second edition, Leipzig, 1930). Best modern Marxian defense on basic philosophic assumptions of the Marx-Engels nature-dialectics; politically errant.
Dietzgen, Joseph, Philosophical Essays (Chicago, 1906). Positive Outcome of Philosophy (Chicago, 1906).
Untermann, Ernst, Die logischen Mangel der engeren Marxismus (Munich, 1910).
Dietzgen and Untermann have a special philosophical theory adapting Marxism. It was accepted only by a small group and is now nearly extinct.
Gorter, Hermann, Der historische Materialismus (1909—German). I have not read Gorter but Lenin thought highly of his work. He is celebrated in Germany as a thorough defender of Marxian philosophy and as adding rich details to the theory.
Mondolfo, R., Le Materialisme historique (Paris, 1917—French).
Sée, Henri, Economic Interpretation of History (New York, 1929). The famous economic historian of France puts in a serried attack on historical materialism; it is far below his excellent historical work in quality. His philosophic mind does not rival his ability to recapitulate historic phenomena
Bober, M. M., Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History (Harvard University, 1927). The most important American examination of historical materialism; useful for its canonical summary of the intellectual criticism of Marx. The best book for American students to read so as to become acquainted with the current academic view of limitations of the Marxian explanation.
Bukharin, N., Historical Materialism (New York, 1924). The most diffused study of historical materialism as a formal discipline. Richly documented, but there can be little doubt that it expressed a personal approach and was viewed as off center by most Marxians when it appeared.
Chang, S. H. M., Marxian Theory of the State (Philadelphia, 1931).
Cooper, Rebecca, Logical Influence of Hegel on Marx (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1925).
Myrdal, G., Das politische Element in der nationalökonomischen Doktrinbildung (1932—German). Myrdal attempts to illustrate the political assumptions that are implicit in any statement of economic categories and of which Marx is a shining example. Hostile.
Jackson, T. A., Dialectics (New York, 1937). By all odds the most entertaining book in English on the subject. Gay, aggressive, well documented, despite its pugnacious sections and deliberate amateur appearance, as well as its annihilation of regiments of straw men, it is invaluable to the English-speaking student.
Prenant, Marcel, Biology and Marxism (London, 1937). The dean of French biology reappraises Darwinian experience in the light of Marxian doctrine, which he then applies, and he reaches some specific conclusions even as to unemployment!
Sulzbach, W., Die Anfänge der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung (1911—German). The best description of the sources of historical materialism.
Adler, Max. The works of this, the foremost Kantian exponent of Marxian thought, represent a little library in themselves. The most important are: Kausalität und Teleologie (Vienna, 1909), Marx als Denker, Wegweiser, the last an excellent theoretical account of Marxian forerunners (Vienna, 1931), and above all his ambitious attempt to refute Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism in 1931.
Riekes, Hugh, Die philosophische Wurzel des Marxismus. This exposition of dialectical materialism attempts to discredit it by showing its “monism” from a materialist viewpoint (in Zt. f. d. Gesammte Staatswissenschaft, 1906—German).
Erdmann, Benno, Die philosophischen Voraussetzungen der Mat. Geschichtsaufassung (Schmoller’s Jahrbuch, 1907). The most encyclopedic philosopher of Germany attempts to crack historical materialism, on a metaphysical basis, by assailing its use of categories, from a Kantian viewpoint.
ON ECONOMIC THEORY
Leroy-Beaulieu, Le Collectivisme (Paris, 1885—French). Anti-Marxian.
Pirou, G., Les Doctrines économiques en France depuis 1870 (Paris, 1929—French). Gives Marxian debate in France.
Hearnshaw, J. C., Survey of Socialism (London, 1928).
Keynes, J. M., Laissez-Faire and Communism (New York, 1926—pamphlet).
Laski, H. J., Communism (London, 1927). Popularization, summary.
Boudin, Lee, Stone, The Socialism of Our Times (New York, 1926). References to Value Theory.
Boucke, O. F., Limits of Socialism (New York, 1920).
Bukharin, N., ABC of Communism (Detroit, 1921). Over-schematized.
Taussig, F. W., Principles of Economics (New York, 1912). Long study of Socialism.
Seligman, E. R. A., Principles of Economics (New York). Slight reference to Marx.
Hobson, J. A., Economics and Ethics (Boston, 1924). Contests surplus-value.
Beer, Max, Communism. Historical economic survey.
Hillquit, M., Socialism in Theory and Practise (New York, 1906). Kautskyist.
Tawney, R. H., The Acquisitive Society (London).
Laidler, H. W., The New Capitalism and the Socialist (New York).
Hobson, J. A., Imperialism (London, 1905). Source-book for Lenin.
Von Wieser, Natural Value (London, 1893). Austrian classic.
Boucke, O. F., A Critique of Economics (New York, 1922).
Laidler, H. W., Concentration and Control in American Industry (New York, 1931).
Anderson, B. M., Jr., Social Value (Boston, 1911). Ammunition for attack on Austrians.
Anderson, B. M., Jr., Value of Money (New York, 1916). Entertaining.
Cannan, Edwin, An Economist’s Protest (London, 1928).
Moore, H. L., Laws of Wages (New York, 1911). Imputationist.
Cahen, Hermann, Capital To-day (New York, 1915).
Spargo and Arner, Elements of Socialism (New York, 1912). Reformist.
Leichte, Otto, Die Wirtschaftsrechnung in den Socialistische Gesellschajt (Vienna, 1923—German). Acute extension of Marxism into Socialism.
Bukharin, N., Oekonomie der Transformationsperiode (Hamburg, 1922—German).
Sternberg, Fritz, Der Imperialismus (Berlin, 1925—German).
Tugan-Baranowski, Theoretische Grundlagen des Marxismus (Leipzig, 1908—German). Formulates reconciliation of Marx and Utility school.
Veblen, T., Theory of Business Enterprise (New York, 1904). Infuenced by Marxism but extremely heterodox. Bolshevism, a Menace to Whom? (New York, 1921).
Clark, J. M., Studies in Economics of Overhead Costs (New York, 1923). Throws indirect light on Marxian theory of faux frais.
Pareto, V., Manuele di Economia Politica (Milan, 1904—Italian). Equilibrium critique of Marx.
Moore, H. L., Synthetic Economics (New York, 1929). Attempt to create a dynamic, mathematical expression of Clark’s imputations.
Dalton, H., Inequality of Incomes (London, 1920).
Palyi, M., Die Wirtschaftswissenschaft nach dem Kriege (2 volumes, 1925—German). Complete survey of postwar economic theory.
Cassel, G., The Theory of Social Economy (New York, 1925). See text.
Kleene, G. A., Profits and Wages (New York, 1911). Residual claimant theory.
Clay, Henry, Economics for the General Reader (New York, 1926). See text.
Persons, W. M., Forecasting Business Cycles (New York, 1931). Gives all theories, excepts the Marxian from notice!
Clark, J. M., Strategic Factors in Business Cycles (New York). Tries to isolate varying mechanics of outbreaks of crises, apart from fundamental explanations.
Gray, A., Development of Economic Doctrine. Merely sneers at Marx.
Salz, J. A., Das Wesen der Imperialismus (1922—German).
Rodbertus, K., Overproduction and Crises. See text.
Lewis, J., Social Credit (London, 1934). Quasi-Marxian examination.
Britain Without Capitalists (London, 1936). An attempt by a group of anonymous Marxian experts to reintegrate British economic needs into a socialistic organization. Most ambitious concrete Marxian effort.
Rochester, Anna, Rulers of America (New York, 1935). Although the most valuable study of plutocracy, is extremely loose in economic classifications and has a fair number of inaccuracies.
Lenin, V. I., Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States (New York, 1937).
Friedemann, Georges, Machinisme et culture (Paris, 1935—French). Attempts to differentiate capitalist and socialist-intensity of labor by social-economic context.
ECONOMIC HISTORY (RELATED TO MARXIAN ANALYSIS)
Ridgeway, William, The Origin of Metallic Currency (Cambridge, 1892). A profound archeologist converges on Marxian history.
Cunow, H., Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte (4 vols., Berlin, 1926, 1931-German). The combative and learned textbook of Marxian ethnological and economic history, attacking all opponents, however authoritative. Indispensable to advanced Marxian scholarship. (Even Leninists who attack Cunow’s theories admit his historic competence as a Marxian.)
Cunow, H., Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe und Familie (Stuttgart, 1912- German). The most modern summary of the Engels-Morgan viewpoint; belligerent.
Dopsch, Alfons, Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der Eur. Kulturentwickelung (Cäser bis Karl den Grossen). A remarkable study of the origins of European feudalism and the tribal organization of the Teutons and Celts, which denies the factual basis of the Marxian reconstruction. Dopsch generally contests stereotyped pictures of economic evolution. Marxians consider him an overlearned non-thinker. (A condensed translation is Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization, New York, 1937.)
Lenin, V. I., Britain, an Anthology (New York, 1936). Continues Marx and Engels special studies on British economic evolution.
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, History of Trade Unionism (London, 1894). Industrial Democracy (London, 1897).
Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926).
Beer, Max, History of British Socialism (London, 1913).
Kirkup, Thomas, History of Socialism (revised edition, London, 1913).
Oppenheimer, F., The State (New York, 1926). Robber theory of the state, like Dühring’s Force theory.
Hillquit, M., From Marx to Lenin (New York, 1921). Kautskyist.
O’Neal, J., Workers in American History (1910?).
Sombart, Werner, Quintessence of Capitalism (New York, 1915). English translation of Der Bourgeois.
Levine (Lorwin), Louis, Labor Movement in France (New York, 1911).
Commons, J. R., Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York, 1924).
Weber, Max, General Economic History (New York, 1927).
Roll, Erich, A History of Economic Thought (New York, 1937).
De Leon, Daniel, James Madison and Karl Marx (New York, 1920). Reprint.
De Leon, Daniel, Two Pages from Roman History (New York, 1905). Inspired Lenin to high praise.
Bebel, August, Woman (New York, 1905). Marxian classic on Feminism.
Fine, Nathan, Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States (New York, 1929). Historical survey, 1828-1928.
Kullischer, J., Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte (2 volumes, second edition, Jena, 1927—German). By long odds the greatest history of modern economic life in any language.
Dawson, Wm. Harbutt, German Socialism and Ferdinand Lasalle (New York, 1899). Best study of Rodbertus’s economic system.
Brandes, G., Ferdinand Lasalle (New York, 1925). Slightly economic.
Berr, Henry, Le Synthèse en histoire (Paris, 1911). Useful for its reproduction of every theory of history, both materialist and idealist.
Simons, A. M., Class Struggles in America (Chicago, 1909).
Simons, A. M., The American Farmer (Chicago, 1910). Leading pre-Leninist, Marxian study.
Isambert, G., Histoire des idées socialistes en France, 1815-1848 (Paris, 1905—French).
Halévy, Élie, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique (3 volumes, Paris, 1901-04—French).
Ward, The Ancient Lowly (2 volumes, Chicago, 1904). Amazing oleo, unsystematic, uncritical, but rich in information as to class struggles in antiquity; ought to be redone by a serious scholar.
Gerard, Walter, Le Communisme (Paris, 1928—French). Good breezy account of all communistic theories, including Marxian.
Laskine, Edmond, Le Socialisme suivant les peuples (Paris, 1920—French).
Weill, Georges, Histoire du mouvement social en France, 1852-1910 (1912—French). Best account of French Marxianism in setting.
Mavor, J., Economic History of Russia (2 volumes, 1914).
Hutt, Allen, Condition of the Working Class in England (1934). Brings Engels up to date; superb writing.
Dutt, R. P., Fascism and Social Revolution (New York, 1934). Marxian summary of economic causes of Fascist state-form.
Muller, Jean, L’Idée de la lutte des classes depuis le Manifeste Communiste (Paris, 1911—French).
Hyndman, H. M., Evolution of Revolution (London, 1909).
Brissenden, Paul, The I. W. W. (Columbia University Studies, New York).
Soul, L., Materiaux pour une histoire du prolétariat (Paris, 1919—French).
Fay, C. R., Life and Labor in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1920).
Douglas, Hitchcock, Atkins, The Worker in Modern Economic Society (London, 1923).
De Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières en France, 1789-1870 (Paris, 1904—French). Best account of genesis of proletariat as a functioning class.
Kautsky, Karl, Foundations of Christianity (New York, 1932).
Beer, Max, Social Struggles in Antiquity (New York, 1933).
Beer, Max, Social Struggles in the Middle Ages (New York, 1933).
Hutt, Allen, This Final Crisis (New York, 1935). Really a summary history of British economics since Waterloo.
Saposs, David, Left-Wing Unionism (New York, 1926). A more significant study of syndicalism and the I. W. W. than Brissenden. Saposs understands the far more socialist character of American industrial unionism, than, say, Spanish syndicalism.
Simons, A. M., Social Forces in American History (New York, 1914).
Stern, B. J., Lewis H. Morgan (New York). Declares unilateral evolution basically modified.
ANARCHIST
Kropotkin, P., Mutual Aid (London, 1904). Indispensable.
Kropotkin, P., Fields, Factories and Workshops (London, 1908).
Tucker, B. R., Instead of a Book (Boston, 1893).
Tcherkessoff, W., The Doctrines of Marxism (Part translation, New York, 1902).
James, C. L., History of the French Revolution (Chicago, 1902). Denies Marxian method.
ANARCHISM-MARXIAN REPLY
Plekhanoff, George, Anarchism and Socialism (New York, no date).
NOTE: Numerous critiques by Plekhanoff appear in his collected works in 26 volumes (Russian, Moscow).
Nettlau, Max, Bibliographie de l’anarchisme (Brussels, 1897). Gives the sources of economic theory, recapitulates early anarchist Marxian critiques.
MODERN UTOPIAN
Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward (Boston, 1889). Egalitarianism.
Morris, William, News from Nowhere (London, 1887).
Wilde, Oscar, Soul of Man under Socialism (London, 1885).
FORMAL SOCIALIST (LITERARY)
Gronlund, Laurence, Co-operative Commonwealth (New York, 1886).
Wells, H. G., New Worlds for Old (London, 1908).
London, Jack, The Iron Heel (New York, 1912). Vigorous analysis in disguise of fiction.
ECONOMIC STATISTICS
Douglas, Paul H., Real Wages in the United States (Boston, 1930).
Clark, Colin, A Critique of Russian Statistics (London, 1939). This Fabian scholar is both critical and captious of the bases of the impressive Russian figures, especially of production. Somewhat strained and overstresses minor faults in procedure, but confirms recent gains in well-being of Russian workers.
ECONOMICS
Lexis, W., “The Third Volume of Marx’s Capital,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1895.
Shaw, B., Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism (London, 1928). See text.
Fabian Essays (London, 1888). Classic formulation of English “gradualism” and State Socialism.
Penty, A. J., Restoration of the Guild System (London, 1911). Highly colored history of medieval happiness of labor.
De Maeztu, Ramiro, Authority, Liberty and Function (London, 1915). Grandiose hodge-podge with sideswipes at Marxism.
Orage, A. R., National Guilds. Best exposition.
Kautsky, K., Bernstein und das Sozialdemokratische Program (Stuttgart, 1899—German). Orthodox Marxism.
PSYCHOLOGY OF ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS
Marr, Heinz, Proletärische Verlangungen (Berlin, 1922—German).
Michels, Roberto, Psychologie des antikapitalistischen Massen (Berlin 1922—German).
PHILOSOPHY
Adler, Max, Kant und der Marxismus (1922—German).
Roberts and Carson, Dialectical Materialism (New York, 1939).
Selsam, Howard, What Is Philosophy? (New York, 1938).
HISTORY (TYPICAL WORKS)
Hardy, Jack, First American Revolution (New York, 1938).
Allen, J. S., Reconstruction, 1865-77 (New York, 1937).
Lozovsky, A., Marx and the Trades Unions (New York, 1935).
Cunow, H., Die soziale Verfassung des Inkareichs (1927).
Bebel, A., Die Mohammedanische-Arabische Kulturperiode (1884—German).
Mehring, Franz, Deutsche Geschichte v. Ausgang des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1910—German).
TREND OF RECENT BOOKS RELEVANT TO MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Marxism is very much à la mode among intellectual circles at the moment, and the books pro and con have multiplied beyond the attention of specialists. Certain tendencies predominate:
A. The debate on the economic presuppositions of distribution and planning of production in a socialistic economy, especially as to the price-function under such a society:
Examples: Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (Minneapolis, 1938); of the distinction between planning and Socialism in Carl Landauer’s Planwirtschaft und Verkehrswirtschaft (Munich and Leipzig, 1931), which deals with the von Weiser hypothesis of the persistence of “value” under Socialism; of the learned Eduard Heimann, whose Kapitalismus und Sozialismus (Potsdam, 1931) attempts to make precise the actual economic theoretical differences of capitalism and socialism, not merely as functional distinction, but as to the effect on the “categories”; of the grand old man of Cambridge, Professor A. C. Pigou, whose Socialism vs. Capitalism (London, 1937) attempts an internal criticism and, at the least, avoids the ruts of discussion; R. L. Hall’s The Economic System in a Socialist State (London, 1937) and the projected work of H. D. Dickinson, Economics of Socialism, indicate that socialism of the Marxian form is anticipated as a living reality and so political economy is attempting to study it on its own basis and not as a mere counterfoil to capitalism.
B. The rise of dialectical materialism to a triumphant place in the laboratory itself. Here various degrees of assimilation are to be noted, but the testimony of the eminent biochemist, J. B. S. Haldane, in his Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences (New York, 1939), is almost wholly in the mold of Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Further apart are the works of H. Levy of the Imperial College of Science, of Henri Mineur in astronomy (in France), of the psychologist Henri Wallon in vocational studies and in neurology, of Hessen in Russia in the history of science, and of Prenant in biology and Langevin in physics. Disdained as an outside hypothesis only a decade ago, dialectical materialism has passed from theoreticians to working scientists; for instance, J. D. Bernal’s Social Function of Science (London, 1939) is a much more detailed study of Marxian significance for exact sciences, more canonical than J. B. S. Haldane and more orthodox than H. Levy. He testifies, in excellent style, to the deep impress of Marxism on working scientists in Great Britain.
C. In philosophy and ethnology, dialectical materialism has taken the offensive against all competing schools. Paul Nizan’s sardonic Les chiens de garde assailed the apologetic nature of French philosophy; it was Leninism assimilated in the style of Diderot. Rivet in ethnology, attacked, and Henry in his Origines de la réligion repudiated the hitherto dominant school of the sociologists such as that of Hubert and Mauss. In pure historical theory, the new Encyclopédie Française is saturated with Marxian thinking, and the general co-ordinator of French learning, Lucien Febvre, is practically an adept.
D. Proletarian history is being rewritten. Morton’s People’s History of England re-evaluates history as against the liberal tradition; the civil war in Spain renewed interest in Marx and Engels’s Revolution in Spain; Pierre Derocles gave a sketch of Saint-Just, ses idées politiques et sociales that adapted the Jacobin science of Mathiez to quasi-Marxism, and Marc Bloch’s Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française, by insisting on reciprocal factors, gave a Marxian context to medieval society.
E. Greater refinement and maturity in doctrine are to be noted. A decade ago Lapidus and Ostravitianov’s Political Economy or, even later, August Thalheimer’s Dialectical Materialism were taken seriously; today they are known to be wholly incompetent.
1. The Communistic Societies in America.
2. German sources in America include the excellent pamphlets of Herman Schlueter and his English monograph, Lincoln, Labor and Slavery (New York, 1913), and especially Die Anfänge der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung in Amerika (Berlin, 1907-German), the best account of the roots of American Marxism.
3. Dates of publication are those of the editions I have consulted.
4. Translation not integral. Includes “Feuerbach,” which see. Also issued in New York, 1939. I have not listed Marx’s Holy Family, as it is not very germane to the scope of this book.
5. See The German Ideology.
6. A new edition, with explanatory data by Varga and Mendelsohn (New York, 1939), is the most helpful version.
7. Replaced by the masterly section on “Dialectical Materialism” in the recent History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which is far more illuminating, in fact, is the best short description available.