The Library
Public-domain works of political economy, sociology, politics and history, with annotations on the conditions they were written in and the effects they have had since.
- 375 BC
The Republic
Plato’s dialogue on justice, narrated by Socrates. Challenged by Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is the interest of the stronger, and by Glaucon and Adeimantus to show that justice is good in itself, Socrates builds an ideal city as a model of the soul: a state ruled by philosopher-kings and guarded by an educated class without private property or families, where women share in rule. The work ranges over education and the censorship of poetry, the Idea of the Good, the allegory of the cave, the decline of constitutions into tyranny, and the immortality of the soul.
- 350 BC
Politics
Aristotle’s inquiry into the city-state, the community that exists for the sake of the good life. Book I treats the household, slavery and the art of acquiring wealth; Book II criticises the ideal states of Plato and others and the constitutions of Sparta, Crete and Carthage; Book III defines the citizen and classifies constitutions; Books IV–VI study actual democracies, oligarchies and polities and the causes of revolution; Books VII–VIII sketch the best state and its education. Man, Aristotle argues, is by nature a political animal.
- 98
Germania
Tacitus’s short ethnography of the peoples beyond the Rhine and the Danube, written in 98. The first half describes the Germans in general—their origins, land, arms, assemblies and chiefs with their retinues, marriage, hospitality, land-holding and burial—often in implied contrast to Roman luxury; the second goes through the tribes one by one, from the Rhine to the Baltic. Engels, Morgan and Maine drew on it for the gentile constitution and the communal holding of land among the early Germans.
- 1516
Utopia
More’s dialogue on the best state of a commonwealth. In Book I the traveller Raphael Hythloday condemns the England of enclosures, where “sheep devour men”, thieves are hanged for want of any other living, and princes take counsel only for war and revenue; he concludes that where private property and money rule there can be no justice. Book II describes the island of Utopia, which holds all things in common: a six-hour working day, elected magistrates, gold kept for chamber pots and fetters, and religious toleration.
- 1531
Discourses on Livy
Machiavelli’s commentary on the first ten books of Livy’s history of Rome, and his fullest statement of republican politics. Book I treats Rome’s internal order: mixed government, the creative tumults of nobles and commons, religion, corruption and the founders and reformers of states. Book II turns to expansion, alliances, colonies and war, Book III to what single citizens did to make Rome great. Throughout, he holds up ancient example against modern Italian weakness, arguing that a free people is wiser and more constant than a prince.
- 1532
The Prince
Machiavelli’s handbook for a new prince, written in 1513 after the Medici’s return to Florence cost him his post, and dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. It classifies principalities and how they are won and kept, argues that a prince must rely on his own arms rather than mercenaries, and that he must learn “how not to be good”: better feared than loved, keeping faith only when it serves him, imitating both the lion and the fox. It closes with fortune, which a bold prince can master, and an appeal to free Italy from the barbarians.
- 1625
On the Law of War and Peace
Grotius’s treatise, written in exile during the Thirty Years’ War, that founded modern international law. Against those who held that law falls silent among arms, he argues that a law of nature, grounded in man’s sociable reason, binds peoples and rulers even in war. He sets out when war is just—defence, recovery of property, punishment—how sovereignty, property, promises, treaties and embassies bind states, and what restraint is owed to enemies, captives and neutrals, with good faith as the bond of peace.
- 1651
Leviathan
Hobbes’s treatise on the commonwealth, written in Paris exile at the end of the English civil war. Starting from a materialist account of sense, speech, reason and the passions, it argues that without a common power men live in a war of every man against every man, and that to escape it they covenant to authorise an absolute sovereign, the “Mortall God”. The second half subordinates church to state by a close reading of Scripture and attacks the “Kingdome of Darknesse” of Rome and the schools.
- 1677
Ethics
Spinoza’s masterpiece, published after his death and set out like Euclid in definitions, axioms, propositions and proofs. Part I proves that there is only one substance, God or Nature, of which thought and extension are attributes and all things are modes, and that everything follows from it by necessity. Parts II and III treat the mind as the idea of the body and the emotions as natural things. Parts IV and V show human bondage to the passions and the freedom won by understanding, ending in the intellectual love of God.
- 1689
A Letter Concerning Toleration
Locke’s plea for religious toleration, written in Latin in Dutch exile in 1685 and published at Gouda in 1689, then in Popple’s English the same year. The care of souls, Locke argues, does not belong to the civil magistrate, whose power extends only to civil interests—life, liberty, health and possessions—and cannot compel the inward persuasion on which salvation depends. A church is a free and voluntary society. Toleration is denied only to atheists, to those who will not tolerate others, and to churches that owe allegiance to a foreign prince.
- 1689
Second Treatise of Government
The second of Locke’s Two Treatises, published anonymously late in 1689 to justify the Revolution of 1688. From a state of nature in which all are free and equal under the law of nature, Locke derives property from labour, explains how money permits unequal possessions, and founds political society on consent for the preservation of property. Government is a trust limited by law; when the legislative or the prince betrays it, power reverts to the people, who may resist and set up a new government.
- 1693
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Locke’s advice on bringing up a gentleman’s son, first written as letters to his friend Edward Clarke and published in 1693. Beginning from “a sound mind in a sound body”, he treats hardening the body, then the forming of the mind: habits of self-denial set early, government by esteem and disgrace rather than the rod, example over rules, and a tutor of good breeding. Virtue, wisdom and good manners come before learning, which should be made a pleasure; it ends with languages, studies, trades and travel.
- 1714
The Fable of the Bees, Parts I and II
Mandeville’s doggerel fable of a thriving hive of rogues that, made honest by Jove, sinks into poverty, with the prose that grew around it: an Enquiry deriving moral virtue from flattery and pride, twenty-two Remarks, an attack on charity schools, and a reply to the Grand Jury that presented the book. Its thesis, “Private Vices, Publick Benefits”, makes luxury and vanity the motors of trade. Part II (1729) recasts the argument as six dialogues between the sceptical Horatio and Cleomenes, tracing the slow, unplanned growth of society, language and government from human pride and self-liking.
- 1714
The Monadology
Leibniz’s summary of his metaphysics in ninety short sections, written in French at Vienna in 1714 and first published in German in 1720. The world is made of monads, simple substances without parts or windows, each mirroring the whole universe from its own point of view through perceptions and appetitions. Their agreement is a harmony pre-established by God, who chose the best of all possible worlds by the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason; souls and bodies follow their own laws, and minds form the City of God.
- 1721
Persian Letters
Two Persian noblemen, Usbek and Rica, travel to Paris in 1711 and write home for nine years. Their letters turn the gaze of a foreigner on France at the end of Louis XIV’s reign and under the Regency: the king, the Pope, the parlements, fashion, Law’s paper money, the Academy, religion and religious persecution. Between them run fables of the Troglodytes on justice, reflections on law, depopulation and despotism, and the story of Usbek’s seraglio at Ispahan, where the women he rules from afar revolt, ending in Roxana’s suicide letter.
- 1739
A Treatise of Human Nature
Hume’s first and most ambitious work, published anonymously at twenty-seven: an attempt to found a science of man on experience. Book I traces all ideas to impressions, finds no reason behind our inference from cause to effect but custom, and ends in scepticism about the external world and the self. Book II makes reason “the slave of the passions”. Book III derives morality from sentiment, not reason, and justice, property, promises and government from convention and interest. It “fell dead-born from the press”, but shaped Smith, Kant and modern empiricism.
- 1741
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
Hume’s essays on government, parties and liberty, on taste, eloquence and the arts, on the passions and the schools of philosophy, and, in the Political Discourses of 1752, on commerce, money, interest, the balance of trade, public credit and the populousness of ancient nations, with his answers to the theory of an original contract and his sketch of a perfect commonwealth. Written for a general reader in a light, sceptical style, they shaped Smith’s political economy and the American founders’ ideas of faction and of a large republic.
- 1748
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
Hume’s recasting of Book I of the Treatise for a wider public. All ideas are copies of impressions; reasoning concerns either relations of ideas or matters of fact, and every inference about matters of fact rests on cause and effect, which is known only by experience and drawn from it by custom, not reason. Necessary connexion is found to be a feeling of the mind, liberty is reconciled with necessity, testimony to miracles is weighed and found wanting, and a mitigated scepticism closes the work.
- 1748
The Spirit of the Laws
Montesquieu’s comparative study of laws and the conditions that shape them. Every government has its nature and its principle: virtue in a republic, honour in a monarchy, fear in a despotism, and its laws must answer to these. Liberty depends on separating the legislative, executive and judicial powers, as in England. Laws must also suit a country’s climate, soil, commerce, money, population and religion. The last books trace Roman inheritance law and the feudal laws of the Franks.
- 1751
An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals
Hume’s own favourite among his writings, recasting the moral theory of Book III of the Treatise. Morals rest finally on sentiment, not reason: we call virtuous those qualities of mind that are useful or immediately agreeable to their possessor or to others, and we approve them through a natural sympathy with the good of mankind. Justice is shown to be an artificial virtue grounded wholly in public utility, and selfish theories of morals are rejected. A closing Dialogue weighs how far moral judgments differ between ages and nations.
- 1755
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Rousseau’s answer to the Academy of Dijon’s question on the origin of inequality. Stripping away what society has added, he pictures natural man as solitary, self-sufficient and moved by self-preservation and pity, with no property, language or lasting ties. Inequality grows with the faculty of self-improvement: settled families, metallurgy and agriculture, then the first man who fenced a field and said “This is mine”, and a fraudulent compact by which the rich turned their possessions into rights and the poor ran headlong into their chains.
- 1758
Tableau économique
The founding text of Physiocracy and the first attempt to model a whole economy as a circular flow. Quesnay divides the nation into a productive class of farmers, a class of landowners, and a “sterile” class of artisans and merchants, and traces how one year’s harvest, through the payment of rent and the purchases of each class from the others, reproduces itself exactly. Only agriculture yields a net product; hence a single tax on land rent, free trade in grain, and secure capital for farmers. Marx called the Tableau the most brilliant idea of which political economy had yet been guilty.
- 1759
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Smith’s moral philosophy, built on sympathy: we judge others by imagining ourselves in their place, and judge ourselves through the eyes of an impartial spectator within. From that root he traces propriety, merit, justice and beneficence, conscience and duty, the pull of utility and fashion, the virtues of prudence and self-command, and the history of moral systems from Plato and the Stoics to Hutcheson and Hume. The last edition, revised shortly before his death, adds his reflections on the corruption of sentiment by admiration of the rich.
- 1762
Emile
Rousseau’s treatise on education, told as the upbringing of an imaginary pupil from birth to marriage. “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” Emile is raised in the country, away from society’s prejudices, learning from things rather than books and from need rather than command; he meets reason only in adolescence, and religion through the “Creed of a Savoyard Priest,” whose natural religion had the book burned in Paris and Geneva. Book V educates Sophy, his future wife, and sends Emile travelling to study governments.
- 1762
The Social Contract
Rousseau’s treatise on legitimate political authority. “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains”: force cannot make right, so the only legitimate order is a compact by which each gives himself wholly to the community and is ruled by the general will. Sovereignty is inalienable and indivisible and cannot be represented; government is only the people’s agent. Books III and IV treat the forms of government, their tendency to degenerate, the Roman institutions, and a civil religion.
- 1767
An Essay on the History of Civil Society
Ferguson’s history of mankind from “rude” to “polished” nations, by Edinburgh’s professor of moral philosophy. Man is social by nature, and conflict as much as union binds societies together; property brings subordination; and institutions arise from human action, not from any human design. The later parts weigh the costs of commercial progress: a division of labour that turns workers into parts of an engine, the decay of public spirit, and a corruption that ends in despotism. Marx cited it on the division of labour.
- 1776
Common Sense
The pamphlet that turned the American quarrel with Britain into a war for independence, published anonymously in Philadelphia in January 1776 and read across the colonies within weeks. Paine distinguishes society from government, a necessary evil; mocks the English constitution, monarchy and hereditary succession as absurd and unscriptural; argues that reconciliation is impossible and that a continent cannot be ruled by an island; and sets out America’s strength to build a navy and form its own republic. The enlarged edition adds an Appendix and an address to the Quakers.
- 1776
The Wealth of Nations
Smith’s inquiry into what makes nations rich: the division of labour, limited by the extent of the market; labour as the real measure of value; wages, profit and rent as the three revenues; the accumulation of capital through productive labour; and a long attack on the mercantile system of monopolies, bounties and colonial trade, ending with the duties of the state and the principles of taxation. Ricardo and Marx built on it and argued with it throughout.
- 1781
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s inquiry into what reason can know independently of experience. Space and time are forms of our sensibility, and the categories, such as substance and cause, are concepts the understanding brings to experience; together they make knowledge of nature possible, but only of things as they appear, not as they are in themselves. When reason reaches beyond experience to the soul, the world as a whole and God, it falls into illusion and contradiction, which leaves room for moral faith.
- 1782
The Confessions
Rousseau’s account of his own life from his birth in Geneva in 1712 to his expulsion from the island of St. Peter in 1765, written to show “a man in all the integrity of nature.” He tells his faults as freely as his virtues: the stolen ribbon, the children left at the foundling hospital, his life with Madame de Warens at Les Charmettes, his years as secretary in Venice and as a writer in Paris, the quarrels with Diderot, Grimm and Madame d’Épinay, and the persecution that followed Emile. It founded modern autobiography.
- 1783
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Kant’s own short restatement of the Critique of Pure Reason, written to answer its first readers. Woken by Hume from his “dogmatic slumber”, he asks whether metaphysics is possible at all, and works analytically through three questions: how pure mathematics, pure natural science and metaphysics are possible. Synthetic judgments a priori rest on the forms of intuition and the categories, which hold only for possible experience; reason’s ideas of soul, world and God therefore yield no knowledge, only a boundary.
- 1785
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Kant’s short foundation of ethics. Nothing is good without qualification except a good will, and an action has moral worth only when done from duty, out of respect for the moral law. That law is a categorical imperative, which commands unconditionally: act only on a maxim you can will as a universal law; treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means. Its ground is the autonomy of a rational will, and freedom is the presupposition that makes it possible.
- 1788
Critique of Practical Reason
Kant’s second critique shows that pure reason can by itself determine the will. The moral law, to act only on maxims that could hold as universal legislation, is given to us as a “fact of reason”, and through it we know that we are free. Duty, not happiness, is the ground of morality, and respect for the law its only proper motive. Yet reason demands the highest good, virtue crowned with proportionate happiness, and so must postulate freedom, the immortality of the soul and the existence of God.
- 1788
The Federalist
Eighty-five essays signed “Publius”, published in New York newspapers from October 1787 to support ratification of the Constitution, then collected in 1788. Hamilton wrote most of them; Madison wrote Nos. 10, 14, 37–58 and 62–63, Jay Nos. 2–5 and 64, and Hamilton and Madison together Nos. 18–20. They argue the weakness of the Confederation, the danger of faction and the remedy of a large republic, the separation of powers with checks and balances, and the design of Congress, the presidency and an independent judiciary.
- 1789
What Is the Third Estate?
The pamphlet that made the Abbé Sieyès famous on the eve of the French Revolution, published in January 1789 as the Estates-General were being summoned. What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To be something. Sieyès argues that the commoners who do the nation’s work are the nation, that the privileged orders stand outside it, and that only the nation, through extraordinary representatives, can make a constitution; he urges the Third to sit apart as a National Assembly, which it did that June.
- 1790
Critique of Judgment
Kant’s third Critique, which sets out to bridge the realm of nature known by the understanding and the realm of freedom governed by reason. Its first part analyses judgements of taste: the beautiful pleases without interest or concept yet claims everyone’s assent, the sublime reveals a power of reason greater than nature, and fine art is the work of genius. Its second part asks how we may judge living things as purposes, and argues that teleology, though only a guide for reflection, points to a moral proof of God.
- 1790
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Burke’s answer, in the form of a letter to a young Frenchman, to the Revolution of 1789 and its English admirers, above all Richard Price’s sermon to the Revolution Society. Against the claim that 1688 gave the English a right to choose and cashier their governors, he sets liberties held as an inheritance from their ancestors; against the abstract rights of man, prejudice, establishments and cautious reform. He attacks the National Assembly’s lawyers, the march on Versailles, the seizure of the Church’s lands, paper money and the new departments, and foresees rule by the army.
- 1791
Rights of Man
Paine’s reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and the most widely read defence of the French Revolution in English. Part I (1791) defends the right of each generation to govern itself, traces the Revolution from the fall of the Bastille, and prints the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Part II (1792) contrasts hereditary monarchy with representative republics on the American model, and proposes for Britain a budget of reform: lower taxes, a progressive tax on estates, and public support for the poor, children and the aged.
- 1792
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft’s answer to Rousseau, Gregory, Fordyce and the conduct-book tradition, dedicated to Talleyrand after his report on national education. She argues that reason and virtue have no sex, that women’s weakness, vanity and cunning are the products of an education aimed only at pleasing men, and that a woman kept dependent can be neither a good citizen, wife nor mother. She calls for women’s independence, friendship rather than gallantry between the sexes, and co-educational national day schools, ending on the follies that ignorance breeds and the reform a “revolution in female manners” would bring.
- 1793
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
Godwin’s treatise of philosophical anarchism. Starting from the claims that men’s characters are formed by circumstances and their actions by opinion, and that truth must prevail when freely discussed, he argues that justice requires each to do the most good he can; that government, law, punishment, promises and private property founded on accumulation all corrupt the mind; and that society should advance by private judgment and sincerity towards small self-governing districts and an equality of goods, the vision Malthus answered.
- 1794
The Age of Reason
Paine’s profession of deist faith, written in Paris in 1793 under the shadow of the guillotine and finished in the Luxembourg prison. Part I rejects revelation, miracle, mystery and prophecy, and finds the only true word of God in the creation, read through science and reason. Part II, written with a Bible at last at hand, goes through the Old and New Testaments book by book to show that their supposed authors could not have written them. Cheap editions made it the most widely read freethinking book of its age.
- 1798
An Essay on the Principle of Population
The anonymous first version of Malthus’s argument, written against Godwin and Condorcet: population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio and subsistence only in an arithmetical one, so that misery and vice must always hold population down to the means of subsistence and no society of equality can last. It surveys savage, pastoral and civilized states, attacks the English poor laws, and closes with a theology of evil as the stimulus that forms mind.
- 1803
A Treatise on Political Economy
Say’s treatise, first published in 1803, recast Adam Smith’s economics as an ordered science in three books: the production, the distribution and the consumption of wealth. It defines production as the creation of utility, treats the entrepreneur as the agent who combines industry, capital and natural agents, and sets out the law of markets, that products are paid for with products, so that a general glut is impossible. It argues against bounties, prohibitions and colonial monopolies, and for light taxes and frugal government. The American edition adds Biddle’s translation of Say’s Introduction.
- 1807
The Phenomenology of Mind
Hegel’s first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind, called The Phenomenology of Spirit in later translations: the path by which consciousness, starting from the bare certainty of sense, discovers through its own experience the inadequacy of each standpoint and rises through perception, self-consciousness (lordship and bondage, the unhappy consciousness), reason, the ethical world, culture, enlightenment and the Terror, morality and religion to absolute knowledge. The source of the dialectic of master and slave and of alienation that Marx took up.
- 1812
Science of Logic
Hegel’s greatest systematic work (1812–16; the first book revised in 1831), the logic not of correct reasoning but of thought’s own categories, which develop out of one another by their inner contradictions. Beginning from pure Being, which turns out to be Nothing and passes into Becoming, it moves through Quality, Quantity and Measure, the Doctrine of Essence (identity, contradiction, ground, appearance, actuality) and the Doctrine of the Notion to the Absolute Idea: the source of the dialectic that Marx said he found standing on its head.
- 1813
A New View of Society
The four essays in which the manager of the New Lanark cotton mills set out his doctrine that character is formed for the individual, not by him, so that any community can be given any character by the right circumstances, training and education. Owen describes how he reformed the village and its mills, plans his Institution for the Formation of Character and an infant school, and calls on government for national education, poor relief through public work and an end to the State lottery. Engels counted Owen among the great utopian socialists.
- 1817
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
Hegel’s whole system in outline, the textbook for his lectures: the Logic (the “Lesser Logic”), from being through essence to the notion and the absolute idea, and the Philosophy of Mind, from the soul, consciousness and psychology through right, morality and ethical life to art, revealed religion and philosophy. The Logic is given with the students’ additions from Hegel’s lectures. Part II, the Philosophy of Nature, has no public-domain English translation and is not included.
- 1817
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
Ricardo’s treatise, first published in 1817, sets out to find the laws that divide the produce of the earth among landlords, capitalists and labourers as rent, profit and wages. It grounds value in the quantity of labour needed to produce a commodity, derives rent from the difference in fertility between the best and the worst land in use, argues that profits fall as wages rise with the price of corn, and makes the case for free trade by comparative advantage. The third edition of 1821 added the chapter “On Machinery”, which Marx admired for its honesty.
- 1819
New Principles of Political Economy
The book in which the Genevan historian Sismondi broke with the school of Smith and Ricardo. Wealth, he argued, is a means to the happiness of all, not an end; production is limited by the revenue of consumers, so unlimited competition and machinery bring gluts, crises and the ruin of the workers they displace, and the propertyless “proletarians” multiply in misery. Marx called him the head of petty-bourgeois socialism: acute in diagnosis, reactionary in his remedies. These selections cover the prefaces, the object of political economy, crises, machinery and the proletariat.
- 1821
The Philosophy of Right
Hegel’s Berlin textbook of 1821, also known as the Elements of the Philosophy of Right: freedom realised in stages, from abstract right (property, contract, wrong) through morality (intention, conscience, the good) to ethical life, where the family, civil (“civic”) society, with its system of needs, courts, police and corporations, and finally the state reconcile individual freedom with the universal. The rational is real and the real rational; the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. The book Marx set out to criticise in 1843.
- 1835
Democracy in America
Tocqueville’s study of the United States, written after his journey of 1831–32 with Gustave de Beaumont. The first volume (1835) examines American institutions: the township, the federal constitution, the courts, parties, the press, associations, the omnipotence of the majority, and the condition of the Indian and Black populations. The second (1840) traces how equality of conditions shapes thought, feelings, manners and political society, warning against individualism and a mild, tutelary despotism. Tocqueville presents the democratic revolution as providential and asks how Europe might keep liberty within it.
- 1837
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Hegel’s Berlin lectures of 1822–31, published from students’ notes after his death: world history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, carried by Spirit through a succession of peoples, from the Oriental world, where “one is free”, through the Greek and Roman worlds, where “some” are, to the Germanic Christian world, where all are known to be free. The work Marx and Engels turned on its head.
- 1840
What Is Property?
Proudhon’s first memoir on property, which answers its title question “it is robbery” and in which Proudhon first calls himself an anarchist. He takes apart each claimed foundation of property (occupation, civil law, labour, consent, prescription), argues that labour leads instead to equality, and offers a would-be mathematical proof that property, as the right to an income without work, is impossible. A last chapter on justice and sociability sets “liberty”, a synthesis of communism and property, against both. Marx praised it in The Holy Family and attacked its author in The Poverty of Philosophy.
- 1841
The Essence of Christianity
Feuerbach’s argument that religion is man’s consciousness of his own nature, projected outside himself and worshipped as another being: “the secret of theology is anthropology.” Part I reads the Christian mysteries (incarnation, trinity, creation, prayer, faith, miracle, immortality) as expressions of human understanding, will and love; Part II exposes the contradictions that arise when theology takes them for a separate divine being. Of its appearance Engels recalled, “we were all for the moment followers of Feuerbach”; it was the starting point of Marx’s critique of religion and his theses on Feuerbach.
- 1841
The National System of Political Economy
List’s answer to Adam Smith and the “cosmopolitical” free-trade school, written for a Germany still divided and outmatched by English manufactures. A history of the trade policies of Italy, the Hanseatic towns, Holland, England, Spain, France, Germany, Russia and America leads into a theory of “productive powers” set against the theory of exchange values: a nation’s wealth lies in its capacity to produce, and a nation that comes late to industry must shelter its young manufactures with moderate duties until they can compete, while trading freely in food and raw materials. It became a founding text of economic nationalism.
- 1843
Past and Present
Carlyle’s tract on the “Condition of England” after the distress and Chartist risings of 1842. England is rich yet dying of inanition, its workers idle in workhouses while “Cash-payment” has become the sole nexus between man and man. Against this he sets the twelfth-century abbey of St. Edmundsbury under Abbot Samson, a world of real government and obedience, then indicts Mammonism, Dilettantism and an idle landed aristocracy, and calls on the Captains of Industry to organise labour. Engels reviewed it warmly in 1844.
- 1844
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction
The introduction Marx wrote in Paris for a planned critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. With the criticism of religion, “the opium of the people”, complete, criticism must turn to law and politics, and Germany, backward in practice but abreast of the age in philosophy, can only be emancipated by a radical revolution. Its agent is the proletariat, the class with radical chains: philosophy is the head of this emancipation, the proletariat its heart.
- 1844
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
The notebooks the twenty-six-year-old Marx filled in Paris in 1844, his first encounter with political economy and his first attempt to join it to a critique of Hegel. Excerpts and commentary on wages, profit and rent lead to the analysis of estranged labour, in which the worker is estranged from his product, his activity, his species-being and other men, and private property appears as the consequence of alienated labour. The third manuscript treats communism as the positive supersession of private property and the return of man to himself as a social being, the human senses as the product of history, money as the inversion of all human qualities, and Hegel’s dialectic as the abstract expression of man’s self-creation through labour.
- 1844
On the Jewish Question
Marx’s review of two 1843 essays by Bruno Bauer, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Against Bauer’s demand that Jews give up Judaism before they can be emancipated, Marx distinguishes political emancipation, which the modern state can grant while leaving religion a private matter, from human emancipation, and reads the rights of man of the French and American constitutions as the rights of egoistic man in bourgeois society. The second part identifies Judaism with huckstering and money.
- 1845
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Douglass’s account of his life in slavery in Maryland, written seven years after his escape to answer those who doubted he had ever been a slave. He describes his separation from his mother, the plantation of Colonel Lloyd, his years in Baltimore, where he taught himself to read, his breaking by the slave-breaker Covey and the fight that restored his manhood, a failed escape, and his flight north in 1838. An appendix distinguishes the Christianity of Christ from the slaveholding religion of America.
- 1845
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Engels’s first-hand study of Manchester and the industrial towns of England, written at twenty-four after two years working in his family’s cotton firm. A founding work of urban sociology and the empirical foundation of the Communist Manifesto’s picture of the industrial working class.
- 1845
The Holy Family: Critical Battle against French Materialism
Marx’s sketch of the history of French and English materialism from Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes and Locke to Helvetius and Holbach, written against Bruno Bauer’s “critical” account: one line of materialism leads into natural science, the other “directly into socialism and communism” — if man is formed by circumstances, circumstances must be formed humanly.
- 1847
Principles of Communism
Engels’s draft programme for the Communist League, written in Paris in October–November 1847 as a catechism of 25 questions and answers, and the direct forerunner of the Communist Manifesto: the industrial revolution and the rise of the proletariat, crises, the abolition of private property, a twelve-point programme of transitional measures, the end of the division of labour and of the opposition of town and country, the family, and the Communists’ attitude to other parties.
- 1847
The Poverty of Philosophy
Marx’s reply, written in French, to Proudhon’s System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty (1846): a critique of Proudhon’s theory of value and of his borrowings from Hegel, and the first published statement of Marx’s materialist conception of history and of the role of strikes and trade unions in the class struggle.
- 1848
On the Question of Free Trade
Marx’s speech to the Democratic Association of Brussels in January 1848, after the repeal of the English Corn Laws: free trade benefits capital, not workers, yet Marx supports it because it hastens the social revolution. Engels’s 1888 introduction applies the argument to the American tariff debate.
- 1848
Principles of Political Economy
The standard treatise of English political economy for half a century. Mill restates Smith and Ricardo on production, value, money and international trade (with his own theory of international values), but holds that while the laws of production are fixed by nature, the distribution of wealth is a matter of human institution. He weighs communism and socialism fairly, defends peasant proprietorship, welcomes a stationary state, looks to co-operation for the future of the labouring classes, and sets out the grounds and limits of laisser-faire.
- 1848
The Communist Manifesto
Written by Marx and Engels as the programme of the Communist League and published in London in February 1848, on the eve of that year’s revolutions. It presents history as the history of class struggles, credits the bourgeoisie with revolutionising production and creating a world market, and argues that the same development creates the proletariat that will overthrow it. The second section answers objections to communism and lists immediate measures, the third criticises rival socialisms, and the last sets out the communists’ tactics. Samuel Moore’s 1888 translation, edited by Engels, with his preface.
- 1849
Wage Labour and Capital
Marx’s popular lectures of 1847 to German workers in Brussels, published in 1849: what wages are, how they are determined, what capital is, and why the growth of capital sets the interests of workers and capitalists against each other. Engels revised it in 1891 to bring it into line with Capital.
- 1850
Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)
The circular Marx and Engels sent to the Communist League’s members in Germany after the defeat of 1848–49, expecting a new revolution: the workers must organise independently of the petty-bourgeois democrats, arm themselves, set up their own revolutionary governments beside the official ones, and push every democratic reform further — “to make the revolution permanent.” Its battle-cry, “The Revolution in Permanence,” became the source of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
- 1850
The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850
Marx’s articles of 1850 on the French revolution of 1848: the February revolution, the June insurrection, the presidency of Louis Bonaparte and the abolition of universal suffrage, analysed as a struggle of classes. With Engels’s 1895 introduction, his last major work, on revolution, the ballot and street fighting.
- 1850
The Peasant War in Germany
Engels’s history of the German Peasant War of 1524–25, written in 1850 after the defeat of 1848–49: the classes of Reformation Germany, Luther’s burgher reformation against Thomas Muenzer’s plebeian revolution, the forerunner revolts, the campaigns in Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia, and the lessons for the defeated revolution of his own time. With Engels’s prefaces of 1870 and 1874, Riazanov’s introduction and notes, and the Twelve Articles of the peasants.
- 1852
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany
Nineteen articles for the New-York Daily Tribune (1851–52) on the German revolution of 1848–49: the classes of German society, the Prussian and Austrian states, the risings in Vienna and Berlin, the Frankfort Assembly, the national question in Poland and Bohemia, and the final campaigns. Published under Marx’s name, they were written by Engels.
- 1852
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Marx’s analysis of how the French Second Republic of 1848 ended in Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of December 1851. A model of class analysis applied to a political crisis, and the source of “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
- 1853
The British Rule in India
Marx’s two most famous articles on colonialism, written in English for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1853: British rule as the destroyer of India’s village communities and handicrafts — “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia” — and, in the second, its “double mission,” destructive and regenerating, through railways, industry and political unity, with a denunciation of the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois-civilization.”
- 1856
The Old Regime and the Revolution
Tocqueville’s study of why the French Revolution happened as it did. Working from the archives of the intendancies, he argues that the Revolution completed rather than broke with the old monarchy: administrative centralisation, the tutelage of the communes and the intendants’ rule all predate 1789. Feudal privileges grew hateful once they no longer answered to any public function; classes grown alike were kept apart by privilege; men of letters became the nation’s politicians, and reform under Louis XVI, amid rising prosperity, hastened the explosion. France had learned to prize equality and reform above liberty. Seven posthumous chapters on 1787–89 follow.
- 1859
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Marx’s first published instalment of his critique of political economy (Berlin, 1859). It analyses the commodity as the unity of use value and exchange value, the labour that creates value, and money as measure of value, means of circulation and hoard, with historical sketches of earlier theories of value and money. The Preface tells how Marx came to economics and gives his most famous summary of historical materialism, base and superstructure; the unfinished Introduction of 1857, printed as an appendix, sets out his method. Capital reworked much of the material in its opening chapters.
- 1859
On Liberty
Mill’s essay on “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual”, written with Harriet Taylor Mill and dedicated to her memory. Against the tyranny of the majority and of custom, it lays down that self-protection is the only ground for interfering with anyone’s liberty, defends full freedom of thought and discussion, argues for individuality as an element of well-being, and applies the principle to trade, drink, education, marriage and the growth of state power.
- 1859
On the Origin of Species
Darwin’s “abstract” of the theory of descent with modification by natural selection, the book Marx read in 1860 and called “the basis in natural history for our view”. It argues from domestic breeding to variation in nature, the struggle for existence and natural selection, then meets the difficulties (instinct, hybridism, the gaps in the fossil record) and closes on geographical distribution, classification and embryology.
- 1861
Ancient Law
Maine’s founding work of historical jurisprudence reads Roman law, with Hindu, Germanic and English evidence, as a record of the earliest ideas of mankind. Against the theorists of natural law and the social contract, he argues that society began not with individuals but with patriarchal families ruled by their heads, and traces how codes, legal fictions, equity and legislation, and the histories of wills, property, contract and crime, record the dissolution of family dependency, summed up in his formula that progressive societies have moved “from Status to Contract”.
- 1864
Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association
Marx’s founding address of the First International, written in English in October 1864: the misery of the workers amid the boom of 1848–64, the Ten Hours’ Bill and the co-operative movement as victories of “the political economy of labour,” the need for political power and international solidarity. With the Provisional Rules, which open: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”
- 1865
Primitive Marriage
McLennan’s inquiry into why so many peoples, from the Spartans and Romans to the Khonds and Kalmucks, stage a mock capture of the bride. He reads the ceremony as the survival of real wife-capture, which he traces to exogamy, the rule forbidding marriage within the tribe, born of female infanticide and a scarcity of women. Along the way he argues that the earliest kinship ran through mothers only, passing through polyandry to agnation. The book coined “exogamy” and “endogamy” and shaped Morgan, Engels and later anthropology.
- 1865
Value, Price and Profit
Marx’s reply, written in English and read to the General Council of the International in June 1865, to the Owenite John Weston, who argued that a general rise in wages could not benefit the workers because prices would rise to match. On the way to refuting him Marx gives the most compact account he ever wrote of the labour theory of value, labouring power, surplus value and the division of profit, two years before the first volume of Capital, and ends by telling the trade unions to inscribe “Abolition of the wages system!” on their banner.
- 1867
Capital, Volume I
Marx’s critique of political economy: the commodity and money, the origin of surplus value in unpaid labour, the working day and the factory system, the accumulation of capital and its general law, and the violent “primitive accumulation” that created capitalism.
- 1869
The Subjection of Women
Mill’s argument that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other” is “wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement”, and ought to give way to perfect equality. He traces the subjection of women to the law of force kept alive by custom, examines the legal slavery of the married woman, contends that nothing can be known of women’s “nature” while it is so artificially formed, claims for women every occupation and the suffrage, and counts the gain to justice, to society’s stock of talent and to marriage itself.
- 1871
The Civil War in France
Marx’s addresses for the International on the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871: a history of the war and the siege, a defence of the Commune as “the political form at last discovered” for the emancipation of labour, and an indictment of its bloody suppression. Engels’s 1891 introduction calls the Commune the dictatorship of the proletariat.
- 1871
The Descent of Man
Darwin’s application of his theory to humankind. Part I argues from anatomy, embryology and rudimentary organs that man descends from some lower form, traces the growth of the mental and moral faculties, including the social instincts and conscience, from animal beginnings, and discusses the affinities and races of man. Part II develops the theory of sexual selection, through competition among males and choice by females, across the animal kingdom from insects to mammals; Part III applies it to the differences between the sexes and races of man.
- 1872
On Authority
Engels’s short polemic against the anarchists, written in Italian in 1872 during the split with Bakunin in the International: modern industry, the railway and the ship cannot run without subordination to a common will, and a revolution is “the most authoritarian thing there is”. Lenin made it a key text of The State and Revolution.
- 1872
The Housing Question
Engels’s polemic of 1872–73 against two would-be solutions to the urban housing crisis of the German boom years: the Proudhonist plan to turn tenants into owners by redeeming rents, and the bourgeois philanthropy of model cottages and building societies. Housing shortage, he argues, is a necessary product of capitalist cities; home-ownership ties workers down and lowers wages; “Haussmann” only moves the slums; and a real solution requires abolishing the capitalist mode of production and the antithesis between town and country — though in the meantime the housing shortage could be relieved by requisitioning the existing luxury dwellings.
- 1875
Critique of the Gotha Programme
Marx’s marginal notes of 1875 on the draft programme uniting the two German workers’ parties: a critique of Lassalle’s ideas, and his only extended sketch of a communist society, with its first and higher phases, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, and the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”.
- 1877
Ancient Society
Morgan’s account of human progress through savagery and barbarism to civilization, traced along four lines: inventions and discoveries, the idea of government, the family, and property. From the Iroquois, whom he knew at first hand, he reconstructs the gens, phratry and tribe, finds the same organization behind Greek and Roman society, and shows how a state founded on territory and property replaced it. Systems of kinship terms record earlier forms of the family. Marx annotated the book, and Engels built The Origin of the Family upon it.
- 1878
Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (Anti-Dühring, abridged)
Austin Lewis’s abridged translation of Anti-Dühring (1878), Engels’s polemic against the Berlin lecturer Eugen Dühring, which became the most systematic exposition of Marxism of its time: philosophy and natural science, eternal truths, equality, freedom and necessity, the laws of dialectics, the “force theory” of history, value and surplus value, and the socialist organisation of production. The first English version of the book; the chapters that became Socialism: Utopian and Scientific are included only in part.
- 1879
Progress and Poverty
George asks why poverty deepens as wealth grows. He rejects the wages-fund doctrine and Malthus, then argues from Ricardo’s law of rent that the gains of material progress go to the owners of land: rent rises, wages and interest are pressed to the margin, and land speculation brings on the periodic depressions. His remedy is to take rent for the community by a single tax on land values, abolishing all other taxes. The book closes on a law of human progress through association in equality.
- 1879
Woman and Socialism
Bebel’s book, first published in 1879 and enlarged through fifty editions in his lifetime, argues that woman was the first human being to be brought into servitude and that her emancipation is part of the social question. It traces the position of women from the matriarchal gens through antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Reformation; surveys marriage, prostitution, female labour, education and legal status in the capitalist present with abundant statistics; and closes with a picture of a socialist society that frees both the worker and woman.
- 1880
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Engels’s popular introduction to Marxism: three chapters of Anti-Dühring (1878), arranged as a pamphlet by Paul Lafargue in French in 1880. The first presents Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen as socialists who looked for a perfect social order to be discovered by reason; the second sets dialectical against metaphysical thinking, from Hegel to Darwin; the third traces capitalism’s conflict between social production and private appropriation to its resolution, when the proletariat seizes the means of production and the state dies out. Engels’s 1892 introduction defends materialism to English readers. One of the most widely read socialist texts of its era.
- 1882
God and the State
A fragment of Bakunin’s unfinished The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution, written in 1871 and published after his death by Cafiero and Reclus. Starting from materialism and the myth of Satan’s rebellion, Bakunin argues that the idea of God means the abdication of human reason and liberty, and that the State is its earthly counterpart. He accepts the authority of the bootmaker and the savant only as advice freely taken, rejects government by science, and ends on idealism as the creed of a bourgeoisie that needs religion for the people.
- 1884
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Engels’s account, built on Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropology and Marx’s notes, of how the family, private property and the state arose with the breakdown of kinship-based societies, including his famous thesis that the subordination of women began with private property.
- 1885
Capital, Volume II
The circulation of capital: the circuits of money-capital, productive capital and commodity-capital, the costs of circulation, turnover time and its effect on the capital advanced, fixed and circulating capital and the theories of Smith and Ricardo, and the reproduction schemes that show how the total social capital, divided into a department producing means of production and one producing articles of consumption, can renew itself and grow. Edited by Engels from Marx’s manuscripts of 1865–1881.
- 1886
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Engels’s account of how Marxism grew out of Hegel’s philosophy and Feuerbach’s materialism: Hegel’s revolutionary method and conservative system, the basic question of idealism and materialism, the limits of Feuerbach’s religion of love, and the materialist conception of history. With Marx’s eleven Theses on Feuerbach of 1845, first published here, ending: “the point is to change it.”
- 1890
Letters on Historical Materialism
Five letters from Engels’s last years, written against young followers who reduced historical materialism to a formula: the economy is the “ultimately determining” factor, not the only one; politics, law, philosophy and religion react back on it; history is the resultant of innumerable wills; and “ideology” is thought that does not know its own driving forces. They became the standard reply to charges of economic determinism.
- 1891
Rerum Novarum
Leo XIII’s encyclical of 15 May 1891 on the condition of the working classes, the founding text of modern Catholic social teaching. It rejects the Socialist remedy of common ownership and defends private property as a natural right, but condemns the “yoke little better than slavery” laid on the workers by unchecked competition. It sets out the duties of employers and workmen, calls on the State to protect the poor, limit hours and secure a wage sufficient for “reasonable and frugal comfort”, and defends the workers’ right to form associations.
- 1892
The Conquest of Bread
Kropotkin’s case for anarchist communism, written for Le Révolté and La Révolte and collected in Paris in 1892 with a preface by Élisée Reclus. Arguing that the wealth of modern society is the joint work of generations and cannot be parcelled out by individual merit, he calls for a revolution that begins by expropriating food, housing and clothing to guarantee well-being for all. He attacks the collectivist wages system, defends free agreement against the State, and closes with intensive agriculture and the decentralization of industry as proof that plenty is within reach.
- 1894
Capital, Volume III
The capitalist process of production as a whole: how surplus-value appears as profit, how competition equalises rates of profit and turns values into prices of production, the law of the falling rate of profit, merchant’s capital, interest, credit and banking, ground-rent, and the “trinity formula” of wages, profit and rent. Edited by Engels from Marx’s manuscripts of the 1860s.
- 1894
The Peasant Question in France and Germany
Engels’s last major article, written in November 1894 against the agrarian programme the French Workers’ Party adopted at Nantes, which promised to protect the small peasant’s holding. The small peasant is a doomed survival of a past mode of production; socialists must neither hasten his ruin nor promise to save his plot, but win him for co-operative farming by example and public aid. Big estates are to be expropriated and worked by co-operatives of their labourers, and the East Elbian farm workers are the decisive battlefield against Prussian Junkerdom.
- 1896
Lectures on Jurisprudence
The notes of a student who attended Adam Smith’s course on jurisprudence at Glasgow in 1763–64, published by Edwin Cannan in 1896. Smith treats justice (government, the family, property, contract and crime, traced through the four stages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce), police (the division of labour, prices, money, the balance of trade and the slow progress of opulence), revenue, arms and the law of nations. Many arguments of the Wealth of Nations appear here thirteen years earlier, in shorter and often livelier form.
- 1899
Evolutionary Socialism
The founding text of revisionism. Bernstein, Engels’s literary executor, argues that the Marxist forecast has not come true: the number of property owners is growing, small and medium enterprises and peasant farms hold their ground, and credit and cartels soften crises instead of sharpening them toward collapse. Socialism should therefore drop the expectation of catastrophe and the dictatorship of the proletariat and act as what it already is in practice, a democratic party of reform working through trade unions, co-operatives, municipal government and universal suffrage. “The movement is everything.”
- 1899
Reform or Revolution
Luxemburg’s reply to Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, written as two series of articles for the Leipziger Volkszeitung (1898 and 1899). Against the claim that credit, cartels and trade unions let capitalism adapt and that socialism can be reached by gradual reforms, she argues that reform and revolution are not alternative roads but means and end: the daily struggle for reforms matters because it prepares the working class to take power, and a party that gives up the final goal ceases to be socialist.
- 1899
The Agrarian Question
Kautsky’s study of how capitalism transforms agriculture, written after the German Social-Democrats rejected a programme to protect the peasantry in 1895. Part I traces the peasant’s fall from the self-sufficient household of feudal times into dependence on the market, applies Marx’s theory of value and ground-rent to the land, and argues that the small farm survives not through superior efficiency but by overwork, underconsumption and wage-work on the side. Part II sets out a Social-Democratic agrarian policy: protection for rural labourers, no measures to prop up small property, and the peasant’s neutralisation rather than his conversion.
- 1899
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Veblen’s anatomy of the propertied class that lives by ownership rather than work. Tracing it from the predatory barbarian, whose exploits earned honour while drudgery fell to women and slaves, he argues that wealth confers esteem only when displayed: through conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste. These canons shape taste, dress, sport, religion and the universities, and the leisure class, sheltered from economic pressure, acts as a conservative drag on the adaptation of institutions to modern industry.
- 1901
A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891
Engels’s comments of June 1891 on the Party Executive’s draft of what became the Erfurt Programme of German Social-Democracy, published by Kautsky only in 1901. After detailed criticism of the theoretical preamble, he attacks the political demands for leaving out the main thing: the party can come to power only in a democratic republic, “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”, and the hope that Germany will grow peacefully into socialism under its half-absolutist constitution is opportunism.
- 1901
Where to Begin?
The leading article of Iskra No. 4 (May 1901), in which Lenin answers the question of where Russian Social-Democrats should begin: not with calls for terror or an immediate assault, but with an all-Russian political newspaper that would serve as collective propagandist, agitator and organiser, the “scaffolding” of a disciplined party. He developed the plan a year later in What Is to Be Done?
- 1902
Imperialism: A Study
Hobson’s diagnosis of the new imperialism of 1870–1900. Part I weighs its economics: the vast tropical annexations brought little trade, few settlers and heavy costs for armaments, but paid a narrow class of investors, financiers, shippers and arms makers. Its taproot is underconsumption: an unequal distribution of income leaves savings that cannot find profitable use at home, so capital presses abroad for outlets. Part II traces the political and moral effects on democracy, militarism, the subject races and Asia. Lenin drew heavily on the book in his own Imperialism.
- 1902
Mutual Aid
Kropotkin’s answer to the “struggle for existence” read as a war of each against all. Drawing on his years as a naturalist in Siberia and on Kessler’s lecture of 1880, he argues that mutual aid is a factor of evolution at least as important as competition, and follows it from insect and bird societies through the clans of “savages”, the village communities of the barbarians and the guilds and free cities of mediæval Europe, to trade unions, co-operatives and village customs in his own day.
- 1902
What Is To Be Done?
Lenin’s 1902 polemic against the “Economists” and his plan for a centralised party of professional revolutionaries: socialist consciousness must be brought to the workers “from without,” trade-union struggle alone leads to bourgeois politics, and an all-Russian newspaper should serve as the scaffolding of a disciplined, conspiratorial organisation. The founding text of the Bolshevik conception of the party.
- 1903
The Souls of Black Folk
Du Bois’s fourteen essays and sketches on “the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century.” It opens with the double-consciousness of life behind the Veil and the problem of the color-line, then moves from the Freedmen’s Bureau and a critique of Booker T. Washington’s program of accommodation, through higher education and the sharecroppers of the Georgia Black Belt, to the Black church, the death of his son, a life of Alexander Crummell, a short story, and the Sorrow Songs.
- 1905
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber’s essay of 1904–5, revised in 1920, asks why modern rational capitalism arose in the West. He finds the answer in the religious ethic of ascetic Protestantism: Luther’s idea of the calling, and above all the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, whose believers sought proof of their election in methodical, tireless work and saved rather than spent. This “worldly asceticism” bred the spirit of capitalism, which outlived its religious roots and became an “iron cage”. Parsons’s 1930 translation includes Weber’s Author’s Introduction and R. H. Tawney’s Foreword.
- 1905
Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution
Lenin’s pamphlet of June–July 1905, written in the middle of the first Russian revolution, comparing the resolutions of the Bolsheviks’ Third Congress with those of the Menshevik “Conference”. Against the view that the bourgeoisie must lead a bourgeois revolution, he argues that the working class, allied with the peasantry, must push it to a “decisive victory” through an armed uprising and a provisional revolutionary government, the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”, while the liberal bourgeoisie will seek a deal with the Tsar.
- 1906
Results and Prospects
Trotsky’s balance-sheet of the 1905 revolution, written in prison in 1906 after the arrest of the St Petersburg Soviet, and the first full statement of the theory of permanent revolution. Russia’s backward development under the pressure of Western states and foreign capital has left a weak bourgeoisie and a concentrated proletariat; the workers, leading the peasantry, can take power before the liberals, will be driven beyond the democratic programme towards collectivism, and can hold on only if the revolution spreads to Europe.
- 1906
Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
Sombart’s classic inquiry into “American exceptionalism”, written after his visit to the United States in 1904. America is capitalism’s promised land, yet its workers reject socialism. Sombart seeks the reasons in their political position (a radical democracy, a voting machine monopolised by two unprincipled parties that court labour), their economic situation (money wages two to three times the German, a comfortable diet, housing and dress), their social standing (equality of manners and the chance to rise) and the escape offered by free land in the West — and predicts that all these will soon disappear.
- 1909
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
Lenin’s polemic of 1908, written against the Russian Marxists Bogdanov, Bazarov and Lunacharsky who sought to join Marxism to the “empirio-criticism” of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. Lenin traces their doctrine of the world as complexes of sensations back to Berkeley’s idealism and Hume’s agnosticism, defends a materialist theory of knowledge in which sensations are images of an objective reality and truth is relative yet approaches the absolute, reads the crisis of the new physics as a crisis of philosophy, and insists that philosophy is a struggle of parties.
- 1913
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
Beard’s study, first published in 1913, argues that the Constitution was an economic document drawn up by men whose property interests stood to gain from it. Using Treasury records of the public debt, he surveys the holdings of each member of the Philadelphia Convention in public securities, money at interest, land and trade, sets their personal property against the small farmers and debtors of the interior, and traces the contest over ratification county by county. It became the most debated book in American historiography.
- 1913
The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
Lenin’s short article for the thirtieth anniversary of Marx’s death (March 1913), presenting Marxism as the legitimate successor of the best of nineteenth-century thought: German classical philosophy, English political economy and French socialism, which it transformed into dialectical materialism, the theory of surplus value and the doctrine of the class struggle.
- 1914
Karl Marx
Lenin’s article on Marx for the Granat encyclopedia, written in 1914: a short life, followed by a compact exposition of Marxism as he understood it (philosophical materialism, dialectics, the materialist conception of history, the class struggle, value and surplus value, socialism and the tactics of the class struggle) and an annotated bibliography. It became one of the most widely used introductions to Marxism in the communist movement.
- 1914
The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
Lenin’s defence, written in February–May 1914, of Clause 9 of the Russian Social-Democrats’ programme, which recognised the right of all nations in the empire to self-determination, meaning the right to secede and form an independent state. Against Rosa Luxemburg, who held that the demand served Polish nationalism, and against the Bundists’ national-cultural autonomy, he argues that the workers of an oppressor nation must defend the oppressed nations’ right to separate, while opposing every bourgeois nationalism, including their own; he draws on the separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905 and on Marx’s writings on Ireland.
- 1915
On the Question of Dialectics
A fragment Lenin wrote in Bern in 1915, at the end of his notebooks on Hegel’s Logic and Aristotle’s Metaphysics: the essence of dialectics is the splitting of a whole and the knowledge of its contradictory parts; the unity of opposites is relative, their struggle absolute; dialectics is present in the simplest proposition, as all of capitalism’s contradictions are in the commodity; and knowledge is a spiral, of which idealism straightens one segment into a line. Mao Zedong built On Contradiction (1937) on it.
- 1917
Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism
Lenin’s “popular outline” of 1916: the concentration of production into monopolies, the merger of banks and industry into finance capital, the export of capital, the division of the world among capitalist combines and great powers, and the parasitism and decay of a capitalism that, in his view, made the First World War inevitable and opened the era of socialist revolution.
- 1917
The April Theses
The short Pravda article in which Lenin, just back in Petrograd in April 1917, published the ten theses he had read to Bolshevik and Menshevik meetings, with a reply to his critics. It rejects “revolutionary defencism” and any support for the Provisional Government, calls for the passage from the bourgeois stage of the revolution to a second one putting power in the hands of the proletariat and poorest peasants, and demands “all power to the Soviets”, a republic of Soviets on the model of the Paris Commune, nationalisation of the land, and a new, Communist party and International.
- 1917
The State and Revolution
Written in hiding between the February and October revolutions of 1917: Lenin’s reading of Marx and Engels on the state as an organ of class rule, the lessons of 1848 and the Paris Commune, the need to “smash” rather than take over the existing state machine, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the two phases of communist society, and the withering away of the state, set against the “opportunists” of the Second International, above all Kautsky.
- 1918
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
Lenin’s reply, written in October–November 1918, to Karl Kautsky’s pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Lenin accuses the leading theorist of the Second International of turning Marx into a liberal: there is no “pure democracy” above classes, bourgeois democracy is democracy for the rich, and the dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and kept by force against the exploiters. He defends the Soviets, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie and the Bolsheviks’ policy towards the peasantry.
- 1920
“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder
Lenin’s pamphlet of April–May 1920, written for the Second Congress of the Communist International, against the “Left” Communists of Germany, Britain, Italy and the Netherlands who refused to work in reactionary trade unions, to stand for bourgeois parliaments or to make any compromise. It draws general lessons from the history of Bolshevism (discipline, the art of retreat, the combination of legal and illegal work) and advises the British Communists to help elect a Labour government in order to expose it.
- 1924
The Foundations of Leninism
Lectures Stalin gave at the Sverdlov University in April 1924, three months after Lenin’s death, and published as a pamphlet that year: a systematic account of “Leninism” as “the Marxism of the era of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution”, under nine heads (historical roots, method, theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peasant and national questions, strategy and tactics, the party and style of work). The second edition revised section 3 to allow the victory of socialism in one country. It became the canonical textbook of the Communist movement under Stalin.