RO  DB  ER  TUS-J  A  GETZOW.

15

which  Marx  and  Lassalle  have  since  unfolded,  and  which,
through  them,  have  reverberated  throughout  the  world.  This
writer  is  Rodbertus-Jagetzow.  Minister  of  Agriculture  in  Prussia
in  1848,  who  immediately  after  that  epoch  retired  to  his  estates
and  occupied  himself  with  farming  and  with  historical  and
economical  researches.  He  published  no  large  theoretical
treatises,  but  only  articles  in  the  Reviews  and  Journals.  His
system  is  expounded  in  letters  addressed  to  his  friend.  Von
Kirchmann.*  The  famous  agitator,  Lassalle,  was  in  regular
correspondence  with  Rodbertus  to  the  end  of  his  life,  and
Marx  borrowed  from  him  the  foundation  of  his  theories.  This
writer’s  small  and  too  little  known  volume  is  certainly  one  of
the  most  original  works  that  Germany  has  produced  in  the
matter  of  Political  Economy,  although  the  basis  of  his  deductions
is,  in  my  opinion,  entirely  erroneous.  Rodbertus  was  not,  it  is
true,  a  Socialist,  but,  like  Ricardo,  he  prepared  the  scientific
arsenal  from  which  Socialism  has  obtained  its  weapons.  We
cannot  give  here  a  complete  analysis  of  the  ideas  of  Rodbertus,
but  can  only  indicate  their  leading  points.
As  he  himself  rightly  says,  his  system  is  only  the  rigorous
application  of  the  principle  laid  down  by  Adam  Smith,  and  still
more  rigorously  formulated  by  Ricardo,  that  all  wealth  ought  to
be  considered  economically  as  the  product  of  labour,  and  as
costing  labour  alone.  Poverty  and  commercial  crises,  those
two  great  obstacles  to  the  regular  progress  of  well-being  and
civilization,  have,  according  to  him,  only  one  cause,  which  is
this  :  As  long  as  the  exchange  of  commodities  and  the  division
of  produce  remain  subject  to  laws  of  historical  origin,  and  not
to  those  of  reason,  so  long  will  the  wages  of  the  working  classes
form  a  relatively  smaller  part  of  the  national  produce  in  proportion ­
  as  the  productivity  of  labour  increases.  Rodbertus
arrived  at  this  conclusion  by  the  study  of  the  economic  influences
which  regulate  the  rate  of  wages  and  of  rent.
The  working  man,  he  says,  brings  on  the  market  a  perishable
*  These  letters  were  collected  and  published  in  1875  under  the  title,
Zur  Beleuchtung  der  socialen  Frage.  Rudolf  Meyer  has  also  recently  (  1882)
brought  out  at  Berlin  (A.  Klein,  publisher)  some  letters  and  fragments  of
Rodbertus  that  are  worth  reading.