IN BERLIN 5”? 

London, 28 September 1892 

Dear Mr Mebhring, 

Kautsky has sent me part of one of your letters with an inquiry ad- 
dressed to me. If you feel somewhat hesitant about writing to me 
because of my failure many years ago to answer two of your letters, 
I have no right to complain. At the time we were, of course, in differ- 
ent camps and the Anti-Socialist Law '! was in force, imposing upon 
us the rule that ‘he who is not for us is against us’. Moreover, if I re- 
member rightly you yourself said in one of the letters that you could 
hardly venture to expect a reply.°’° However that was a long time 
ago and since then we have found ourselves in the same camp. You 
have also done excellent work for the Neue Zeit, a subject on which 
I have been far from parsimonious in my tributes when writing to 
e.g. Bebel.* Accordingly I shall be glad to take this opportunity of re- 
plying to you direct. 

The claim that the discovery of the materialist view of history 
should be ascribed to the Prussian Romantics of the historical school 
is certainly new to me. I myself have Marwitz’s Nachlass and I read 
the book a few years ago but found nothing in it other than some 
splendid stuff about cavalry and an unshakeable belief in the magic 
powers of five cuts of the whip when administered to the plebs by the 
nobility. Otherwise I have been a complete stranger to such literature 
since 1841-42 —TI only applied myself to it very superficially — and 
am certainly in no way indebted to it so far as the present discussion is 
concerned. Marx became acquainted during his Bonn and Berlin 
days with Adam Miller and Mr von Haller’s Restauration, etc., 
and was always somewhat scornful of that vapid, cliché-ridden cari- 
cature of the French Romantics, Joseph de Maistre and Cardinal Bo- 
nald. But even had he come upon passages such as the one you cite 
from Lavergne-Peguilhen,! they could at that time have made ab- 
solutely no impression on him, always assuming he understood what 
the chaps were trying to say in the first place. Marx was then a He- 

* See this volume, pp. 375-76 and 387. 

gelian to whom that passage would have been downright heresy; he 
knew absolutely nothing about political economy and thus could not 
have made anything at all of a term such as ‘economic system’. Hence 
the passage in question, even if he had known of it, would have gone 
in at one ear and out of the other without leaving any noticeable 
trace in his memory. But I very much doubt whether any such allu- 
sions were to be found in the historico-Romantic works read by Marx 
between 1837 and 1842. 

It is indeed a highly remarkable passage and I should like to see the 
quotation verified. I am not familiar with the book, though the au- 
thor is, of course, known to me as an adherent of the ‘historical 
school’. The passage diverges from the modern view on two counts, I. 
in that it derives production and distribution of production 
from the economic system instead of vice-versa, i. e. the economic system 
from production, and, 2. in the role it assigns to the ‘proper ad- 
ministration’ of the economic system, this being open to any number 
of interpretations, so long as one is unable oneself to see from the book 
what the author means. 

But the strangest thing of all is that the correct concept of history 7 
abstracto should be found among the very people who have most abused 
history in concreto—-both theoretically and practically. In the case 
of feudalism the chaps may have seen that fere the political system 
evolved out of the economic system because here it is, so to speak, 
plain as a pikestaff. I say may because apart from the above- 
mentioned unverified passage — you told me yourself that someone 
gave it to you—all I have ever been able to discover about it is that 
the theoreticians of feudalism are, needless to say, less abstract than 
the bourgeois liberals. So if, from this concept of the connection be- 
tween the political system and the spread of civilisation on the one 
hand and the economic system within feudal society on the other, one 
of them proceeds to the generalisation that this applies to all econom- 
ic and political systems, how then explain the total myopia of this 
self-same Romantic, the moment he is faced with other economic sys- 
tems, with the bourgeois economic system and the political systems 
corresponding to its various stages of development — medieval craft 
fraternities, absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republic? 
That is certainly difficult to fathom. And the same chap who regards 
the economic system as the basis of social and political organisation as 
a whole, also adheres to the school to whom the absolute monarchy of 
the 17th and 18th centuries already signifies the fall of man and a be- 

trayal of true political doctrine! 

Admittedly he also says that the political system emanates from the 
economic system and its proper administration as inevitably as does 
a child from the coupling of man and woman. Having regard to the 
widely known teaching of the author’s school, I can only explain this 
as follows: The true economic system is the feudal one. But since hu- 
man malice conspires against that system, it must be properly admin- 
istered in such a way that its existence is protected against these at- 
tacks and perpetuated, and that the political system, etc., continues 
to correspond to it, i.e. is kept, so far as possible, as it was in the 13th 
and 14th centuries. Then the best of all possible worlds and the finest 
of historical theories would each be realised, while the Lavergne- 
Peguilhenian generalisation to the effect that feudal society engenders 
a feudal polity would be reduced to its true essentials.°*? 

For the time being I can only assume that Lavergne-Peguilhen 
didn’t know what he was saying. According to the proverb, certain 
animals occasionally discover pearls and among the Prussian Ro- 
mantics such creatures are strongly represented. Incidentally, it 
might nevertheless be advisable to compare them with their French 
prototypes— to see whether this has not also been borrowed. 

I can only say how grateful I am to you for drawing my attention 
to this point which I cannot unfortunately pursue further at this mo- 
ment. 

Yours very sincerely, 
F. Engels