Letter to Richard Stegemann, March 26, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 26 March 1885


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVII, Moscow, 1935
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO RICHARD STEGEMANN

IN TÜBINGEN

[Draft]

[London,] 26 March 1885

Dear Sir,

I hardly imagine that I would be capable of acceding to your request.[1] You might, it is true, be able to produce a fairly clear portrait of Marx the man from all the activities, both literary and political, Marx engaged in; information on these activities is of course freely available to the world at large, with the single exception of Germany, most of the requisite material having appeared abroad. On the other hand, a character sketch by me would necessarily be brief, hence not only inadequate but[2] dogmatic and likewise 'belletristic', hence worse than nothing at all. Besides I cannot presume that my assessment should be taken by you for gospel, and so could not tell what would ultimately become of my contribution, even having regard to your indisputable bona fides. If, however, you proceed on the assumption that Marx was the exact opposite of the German philistine in every conceivable respect, you can't go far wrong.

Whether this is now the precise moment for a critique of Marx, what with the 2nd book of Capital due to appear in a month or two and with work proceeding on the 3rd, is for you to decide. At all events you are right in saying that criticism and so-called 'scholarship' have disclosed nothing hitherto save a 'general lack of judgment', and no one was more amused by that than Marx himself. I can still see him laughing over the despairing sighs of Mr Schäffle who had studied Capital for ten years and still hadn't understood it.[3]

  1. ↑ On 21 March 1885 Richard Stegemann asked Engels to let him know where he could obtain personal information about Marx for inclusion in a work he was preparing for the press about the latter's economic doctrine. Stegemann requested Engels, in the absence of printed sources for a biography of Marx, to send him his own thoughts about Marx as a man.
  2. ↑ more or less
  3. ↑ See [A. Schäffle,] Die Quintessenz des Socialismus, Gotha, 1875, p. 5; see also Engels' letter to Eduard Bernstein of 12 March 1881 (present edition, Vol. 46, p. 74).