Letter to Conrad Schmidt, October 8, 1888

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 8 October 1888


First published in Sozialistische Monatshefte, Nos. 15 and 16, 1920
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO CONRAD SCHMIDT

IN BERLIN

London, 8 October 1888

Dear Dr Schmidt,

I should have answered your letter of 2 February long since had I known where to write to. I had been daily expecting news of your successful Habilitation[1] in Switzerland and hence of your removal to Zurich or Berne. Finally I took it with me to America, which I visited last August and September in company with Dr Aveling and his wife and Schorlemmer, but once again did not get round to answering it during the trip and now, on my return, I find a further message from you dated 23 August (on which day I was battling with mosquitoes in New York, much more dangerous adversaries than all your German professors of political economy put together).

Your account of the adventures attending your Habilitation bring back vivid recollections of the wretchedness of the German universities. That's what passes as freedom of scholarship. It's the old story of Bruno Bauer in the forties,[2] except that we have come on a bit and now have not only theological and political heretics but economic ones also. Still, I trust that Thucydides[3] is in a humane mood and won't place any seri- ous difficulties in your way in Leipzig.

I was most interested to learn that a 'confessional' university still actually exists in Germany.[4] What odd things the 'reborn' fatherland continues to harbour!

I am very anxious to hear about your work. Apart from yourself, Lexis also tried to solve the problem to which I am obliged to revert in my preface to Volume III of Capital. That you should finally have arrived at Marx's viewpoint in the course of your studies doesn't surprise me at all; I believe that this would happen in the case of anyone who tackled the matter painstakingly and with an open mind. After all, many professors nowadays, exploiting Marx as they do, have trouble enough in maintaining a more or less seemly distance between themselves and conclusions that are necessarily bound up with what they have annexed, while others, as the passage you extracted from our Thucydides goes to show,[5] must needs relapse into utter puerility to provide any sort of answer at all!

If, as I hope, my eyesight lasts out—my American jaunt did me a power of good—Volume III[6] will be ready for the press this winter and in a year's time will hit that company like a bombshell. I have broken off or postponed all my other jobs so as finally to be done with it and am exceedingly hard pressed. The greater part is almost ready for the print- ers, but two or three of the seven sections need a great deal of revision, especially the first, of which there are two versions.

I found America most interesting. It is a place one really must have seen with one's own eyes, this country whose history goes back no further than commodity production and which is the promised land of capitalist production. People's usual conceptions of it are as false as those a German schoolboy has of France. There was also much natural beauty to be enjoyed at Niagara, on the St Lawrence, in the Adirondacks and on the smaller lakes.

I have read Platter's critique of G. Cohn.[7] The beginning is very good and witty, but further on the good Platter runs out of steam.

Over here all is much as it was, save that the four people expelled from Zurich[8] have arrived, and Aveling is now writing plays which have been very well received by the impresarios. He was sent to America to rehearse 3 of his plays over there.

I still have a whole pile of letters to answer and if I miss this post I fear I shall be interrupted, so I had better close straight away. Goodbye and let me have further news of you very soon, by which time I trust you will have been duly installed as a lecturer.

Yours very sincerely,

F. Engels

  1. ↑ Qualification for lecturing at universities
  2. ↑ In the autumn of 1841 Bruno Bauer, one of the leaders of the Young Hegelians, was suspended from teaching at Bonn University by Eichhorn, the Prussian Minister of Religious Worship, Education and Medicine. In March 1842, he was dismissed from his post as lecturer in theology on account of his atheistic views and opposition speeches. Bauer's dismissal evoked sharp protests from radical and liberal intellectuals.
  3. ↑ Telling Engels about his intention to obtain the post of senior lecturer at Leipzig University, Conrad Schmidt wrote: 'Whether I will succeed in getting a position in Leipzig is doubtful to me in view of the personal attitude of Mr "Thucydides" Roscher to Marx'. Speaking ironically, Marx and Engels called Professor Roscher by the name of the great historian of the ancient Greece, Thucydides, for, as Marx wrote, Herr Professor Roscher had modestly declared himself a Thucydides of political economy (see present edition, Vol. 32, p570). See Roscher's preface to the first edition of his work Die Grundlagen der Nationaldkonomie 1854.
  4. ↑ On 23 August 1888 Conrad Schmidt wrote to Engels that he was not eligible as lecturer at Halle University on account of his atheist views.
  5. ↑ W. Roscher, Geschichte der NationaTOkonomie in Deutschland Munchen, 1874, S. 1021-1022. In it Roscher gave an evaluation of the Marxian economic theory.
  6. ↑ Of Capital
  7. ↑ J. Platter, Gustav Cohns 'ethische' Nationalökonomie, Wien, 1886
  8. ↑ Eduard Bernstein, Julius Motteier, Leonard Tauscher and Hermann Schlüter