Engels to Georg Heinrich von Vollmar

in Munich

48, Marine Parade
Worthing, England, 13 Aug. 84

Dear Comrade,

Your valued lines were only forwarded to me from London yesterday, hence the delay in my reply.

The question you put to me is difficult to answer or can be answered only in the negative. No science is presently botched more at all universities the world over than the economic one. Not only is there nowhere a man who would present the old classical political economy in the sense of Ricardo and his school; it would even be hard to find one who would present vulgar free trade, the so-called Manchesterism à la Bastiat, in its pure form. In England and America, as in France and Germany, the pressure of the proletarian movement has tinged the bourgeois economists almost throughout with an academic-socialist and philanthropic hue, and an uncritical, well-meaning eclecticism reigns everywhere: a soft, stretchable, gelatinous gelatine that can be pressed into any shape at will and precisely for that reason provides an excellent nutrient fluid for breeding careerists, just as real gelatine does for breeding bacteria. The effect of this enervating, spineless pap of thought is making itself felt even within our party, at least in Germany and here and there among German-Americans, and is proliferating rankly on its margins.

Under these circumstances I would not know how to detect any essential difference between the various universities. Diligent independent study of classical political economy from the Physiocrats and Smith down to Ricardo and his school, together with the study of the Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, and finally of Marx, as well as the continual exercise of one’s own judgment, will, for the most part, have to do the main work. I assume that your friend will study the sources themselves and not let herself be led astray by compendiums and other second-hand sources. For getting to know the economic conditions themselves, Marx, in Capital, has indicated the most essential sources. How to utilise the official statistics of the various countries, what is usable of them and what is not, is best learned through study and comparison on one’s own account. For, generally speaking, independent study, the further one advances in it, furnishes the best guidance for the manner of further learning—provided one has begun with really classical books and not with the most objectionable ones of all: the German compendiums of political economy, or the lectures of their authors.

That is just about all I can say on the matter. And I shall be glad if Miss Kjellberg finds something in it from which she can derive benefit.

For the rest I am looking forward to the Reichstag elections and remain
with sincere esteem

Yours
F. Engels