Economic Treatises Research Articles

Das Kapital One Hundred Years Later

* On August i6, i867, at two o'clock in the morning, Karl Marx wrote to his friend Engels, "Dear Fred, Have just finished correcting the last sheet of the book." The sheets were page proofs, the book Das Kapital, Knitik der politischen Ockonomie. It was Volume One of a projected six-volume work. Marx lived another sixteen years, writing and rewriting endlessly, but he never got out another. Though the author was the descendant of long lines of rabbis on both his father's and his mother's side, and his lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a manufacturer's son, first the manager then the half owner of the Ermen and Engels textile factory in Manchester, "the book" was to become, in Engel's words, "the Bible of the working class." Most workingmen did not and could not read this "Bible," yet it gave comfort to those with faith in it, for its real purpose was to provide "scientific insight into the inevitable disintegration of the dominant order of society." Das Kapital, as a centenarian, still has astonishing vitality. This year philosophers, economists, sociologists, political scientists, politicians will be commenting upon it. Rulers of great lands will quarrel with each other as to who is following it most faithfully, who "revising" or "betraying" it. Certainly, no other economic treatise, from Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in I776, to John Maynard Keynes's