Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, November 7, 1862

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 7 November 1862


First published in: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften. Bd. III, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 41


MARX TO FERDINAND LASSALLE[1]

IN BERLIN

London, 7 November 1862
9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

Freiligrath is sending you £60 today, this being the covering amount for the bill. The renewal of the same, about which I advised you when the operation began, will be effected only in so far as Borkheim is in receipt of a bill on you from me at 2 months after date (dated 6th November, hence payable about 9 January 1863) for the sum of 100 talers, or £15.

From the few lines you wrote me from time to time, I can see that your rancour persists, as, no doubt, the form of the letters was intended to indicate.

The long and the short of it is that you are both in the right and in the wrong. You ask me to send you a copy of the letter you wrote from Baden.[2] For what purpose? So that you could ascertain whether your letter mightn't actually have provided a pretext for[3] the one I wrote to Zurich?[4] Granting you all your POWER OF ANALYSIS, can you, with your eyes, detect what was read by my eyes and, more particularly, can you deduce therefrom the conditions under which my eyes were reading? In order to prove to me that I had misread your words, you would have to equate first the readers and then the circumstances of the readers, an equation you would again tackle as Lassalle under Lassallean conditions and not as Marx under Marxian conditions. Hence nothing could come of it but fuel for fresh controversy. How little the POWER OF ANALYSIS helps in such transactions is evident to me from your letter. For you ascribe to me something I didn't mean. Whatever the cir- cumstances, I myself must be the best judge of the latter. The wording of the letter may support your view, but, as to the meaning that lay behind the words, I myself am, de prime abord,[5] better informed than you. You hadn't so much as an inkling of what had got my back up, namely the impression gained from reading your letter (wrongly, as I now discover on re-reading it in a more serene frame of mind) that you doubted whether I was acting with Engels' consent. I concede that I made no mention of this in my letter and that, leaving the personal relationship aside and simply having regard to our business relationship, it was an absurd supposition. STILL, IT APPEARED SO TO ME AT THE MOMENT I WROTE TO YOU. I further concede that this, my real grievance, was not expressed, perhaps not even hinted at, in my letter; rather, the ISSUE has been ON A FALSE POINT. Such is the sophistry of all passion.

So, anyhow, you are in the wrong because of the way you interpreted my letter; I am in the wrong because I wrote it and supplied the materia peccans.[6]

Is there to be an outright split between us because of this? I believe that the substance of our friendship is strong enough to withstand the SHOCK. I confess to you, sans phrase,[7] that I, as a man on a powder barrel, permitted myself to be swayed by cir- cumstances in a manner unbecoming to an animal rationale. But, at all events, it would be ungenerous of you, as a jurist and prosecutor, to hold against me a status animi[8] in which I would have liked nothing better than to blow my brains out.

So, I trust that, 'despite everything',[9] our old relationship will continue untroubled.

Since that time I have been on the Continent, in Holland, Trier, etc., in order to arrange my affairs.[10] J'ai abouti à rien.[11]

I had intended to send you the Röscher,[12] but discovered that the cost of sending it would be 10/-, the price, if not the actual value, of the Roscher. However, I hope to find an opportunity soon.

My cousin in Amsterdam[13] writes to say that, at his suggestion, your book[14] will be discussed at length in the Amsterdam legal journal by their most learned jurist.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I have been prevented from doing any work at all on my book[15] for some 6 weeks and am now going ahead, but only with interruptions. However, it will assuredly be brought to a conclu- sion BY AND BY.

  1. ↑ First published in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
  2. ↑ Wildbad. See this volume, p. 410.
  3. ↑ See this volume, p. 264.
  4. ↑ ibid., p. 409.
  5. ↑ first and foremost
  6. ↑ the inflammatory material
  7. ↑ without beating about the bush
  8. ↑ state of mind
  9. ↑ An allusion to F. Freiligrath's poem 'Trotz alledem!'
  10. ↑ From 28 August to 7 September 1862 Marx was in Zalt-Bommel and Trier to settle his financial affairs.
  11. ↑ I have achieved nothing.
  12. ↑ W. Roscher, System der Volksurirthschaft.
  13. ↑ August Philips
  14. ↑ F. Lassalle, Das System der erworbenen Rechte.
  15. ↑ This refers to Vogt's pamphlet Mein Prozess gegen die Allgemeine Zeitung. On Tellering's 'concoction' see Note 22.