FIRST COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF MARX’S CAPITAL

MARX, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1906-09. Three volumes. Thick octavo, original maroon publisher’s cloth.

First complete edition in English, considered by many to be the definitive English edition, including the first volume written by Marx and the second and third volumes written by Frederich Engels from Marx’s notes.

“It is doubtful that any figure in history has inspired more violently contradictory opinions than Karl Marx” (Downs, 22). “The author described Das Kapital as a continuation of his Zur Kritik des Politischen Oekonomie, 1859. It was in fact the summation of his quarter of a century’s economic studies, mostly in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The ‘Athenaeum’ reviewer of the first English [edition] later wrote: ‘Under the guise of a critical analysis of capital, Karl Marx’s work is principally a polemic against capitalists and the capitalist mode of production, and it is this polemical tone which is its chief charm.’ The historical-polemical passages, with their formidable documentation from British official sources, have remained memorable; and, as Marx… wrote to Engels while the volume was still in the press, ‘I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives.’ Carbuncles, financial embarrassment and political preoccupations of many kinds hampered Marx’s work on Das Kapital, which he would never have completed but for the material and moral support of Engels” (PMM 359). Expelled from Paris in 1844, from Brussells in 1848, and from Cologne in 1849, Karl Marx moved to London where, with Engels’ support, he endured hunger, the deaths of three of his children and the nervous breakdown of his wife, spending most of the next two decades immersed in research for his great historical analysis of capitalism. Upon publication of Marx’s masterpiece in Hamburg, 1867, the International Working Men’s Association passed a resolution officially describing Das Kapital as the “Bible of the working class.” Only the first volume was completed and published in Marx’s lifetime; the remainder of the work was later constructed by Engels from Marx’s posthumous papers. Das Kapital’s English translations have a complex publishing history. As Ernest Untermann, the editor of this edition, points out in his notes, “The first English translation of the first volume of Capital was edited by Engels and published in 1886. Marx had in the meantime made some changes in the text of the second German edition and of the French translation, both of which appeared in 1873, and he had intended to superintend personally the edition of an English version. But the state of his health interfered with this plan. Engels utilised his notes and the text of the French edition of 1873 in the preparation of a third German edition, and this served as a basis for the first edition of the English translation. Owing to the fact that the title page of this English translation (published by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. [in 1887]) did not distinctly specify that this was but volume I, it has often been mistaken for the complete work, in spite of the fact that the prefaces of Marx and Engels clearly pointed to the actual condition of the matter. In 1890, four years after the publication of the first English edition, Engels edited the proofs for a fourth German edition of volume I and enlarged it still more after repeated comparison with the French edition and with manuscript notes of Marx. But the Swan Sonnenschein edition did not adopt this new version in its subsequent English issues. This first American edition will be the first complete English edition of the entire Marxian theories of Capitalist Production. It will contain all three volumes of Capital in full.” Untermann neglects to mention or was unaware that Volume I only of Capital, “Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production,” was published in a New York edition by Humboldt concurrent with the London Swan Sonnenschein edition. Gift inscription.

Interiors fine, original cloth lightly worn. Inner paper hinges expertly repaired. Near-fine condition.