Le Capital. Extraits faits par M. Paul Lafargue.

A SURPRISING PAIRING.

First edition. Small 8vo (144 x 90 mm). [4], lxxx, 476 pp., frontispiece portrait of Marx with tissue guard. Some browning and occasional spotting. Original light brown ribbed cloth, spine and front board lettered in black (extremities lightly rubbed, corners bumped, otherwise a very good copy). Paris, Guillaumin & Cie., "Petite Bibliotheque Economique".

An abridgement of Marx's Kapital, edited and arranged by the French Marxist Paul Lafargue (1842-1911), a founding member of the French Workers' Party and son-in-law of Marx through his marriage to Marx's second daughter, Laura. Lafargue remained a close correspondent with Engels long after Marx's death, "who used him (as well as Laura) as a channel for advice to the French movement" (Drafer, p. 117). A facile writer whose works rarely extended beyond the status of Marxist popularisation, Lafargue was on the receiving end of Marx's well-known quip, reported in a letter from Engels to Eduard Bernstein: "ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste" ("what is certain to me is that [, if they are Marxists, then] I am not [a] Marxist").

In a rather surprising pairing, the famously libertarian publishing house Guillaumin commissioned the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto to provide a lengthy introduction. Although Pareto was insistent on the theoretical importance of Marx's emphasis on the concept of class struggle, his criticism of Marx as an economist centred on his conformity with the labour theory of value of the classical school. In a letter to Maffeo Pantaleoni, Pareto remarked that "... the importance of Marx ... as an author, [who of himself] is fairly worthless, ... is the socialists who are behind it all' as they consider him to be 'the textbook for nearly all [their] schools'. For this reason, Pareto thought it worthwhile to 'make it known how and where ... he is in error'" (quoted in Mornati, Vilfredo Pareto: An Intellectual Biography, p. 221).

Not in Draper; Einaudi, 3771; Mattioli, 2285; Sraffa, 3881.

Stock Code: 230978