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 pro 
portion 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.