10. From Kritische Geschichte¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 10: From Kritische Geschichte¶
This chapter dissects Herr Dühring’s Kritische Geschichte of political economy, exposing it as a work of staggering pretension matched only by its substantive emptiness. Engels begins by noting Dühring’s claim to unprecedented originality, yet Dühring follows Marx in dating political economy as a modern science. However, Dühring’s treatment of the discipline’s history is a systematic distortion. He dismisses ancient Greek thought as providing “absolutely nothing positive”, ignoring Aristotle’s correct analysis of use-value and exchange-value, and sneers at Plato’s division of labour, a point Marx had already contrasted with modern views. Dühring then misdates the origin of modern economics, citing Serra’s Breve trattato (1613) while ignoring Thomas Mun’s epoch-making mercantilist work of 1609. He dismisses Petty, the true founder of modern political economy, as superficial, despite Petty’s clear 1662 analysis of labour as the measure of value. Petty’s masterpiece Quantulumcunque concerning Money (1682) is not even named. Dühring treats Locke and North as mere reflectors of business opinion, whereas Petty had already argued for free interest rates in 1662, and they largely copied him.
Engels restores the proper chronological order that Dühring has mangled. Dühring jumps from Locke, North, Boisguillebert and Law straight to the physiocrats and then to Hume, striking out the crucial period 1691–1752. In fact, Hume’s economic essays of 1752 follow Jacob Vanderlint’s Money Answers All Things (1734) step by step, even in personal idiosyncrasies. Hume copied Vanderlint’s argument that the balance of trade cannot be permanently favourable, treated money as a mere token, and repeated Vanderlint’s absurd notion that accumulating treasures keeps prices down. Hume confused every increase of precious metals with depreciation, had no understanding of value itself (calling it “merely a fictitious value”), and was inferior to Petty and many contemporaries. Dühring inflates Hume into a star of the first magnitude to serve as his own eighteenth-century predecessor.
On Quesnay’s Tableau économique, Dühring confesses he does not understand it and calls it mysticism. Engels provides a clear exposition: the physiocrats divided society into three classes—the productive class (farmers), the appropriating class (landlords), and the sterile class (industrial producers). The Tableau traces how the total annual agricultural product of five milliard livres circulates among these classes to enable reproduction, answering what becomes of rent in circulation. Dühring’s ignorance extends to putting the “large landowner” at the start of civilised history, knowing nothing of common land ownership in tribal and village communities.
The final verdict is damning. Dühring’s theory of value comprises five contradictory things; his “natural laws” are platitudes; his sole explanation of economic facts is “force”, leaving explanation where it was. Compelled to explain capitalist exploitation, he first represents it as based on taxes and price surcharges (appropriating Proudhon’s “deduction”), then details it using Marx’s theory of surplus-labour, surplus-product and surplus-value, reconciling two contradictory outlooks by copying both. As in philosophy, he heaps hard words on Hegel while exploiting and emasculating him, so in the Kritische Geschichte his baseless calumniation of Marx conceals that everything sensible in the Cursus about capital and labour is an emasculated plagiarism of Marx. The result: colossal self-admiration, charlatan trumpet-blowing, and promises each surpassing the other—but the substance is exactly nil.