Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: Rodbertus-Jagetzow's social-ökonomische Ansichten (1884)

Böhm-Bawerk’s short review evaluates Theophil Kozak’s 1882 exposition of Rodbertus. It moves from an acknowledgment of Rodbertus’s intellectual importance to a criticism of Kozak’s method: collecting dispersed writings is worthwhile, but rearranging extracts into a system can obscure their meaning and authorship.

Rodbertus wird heutzutage mit Recht als der geistige Vater des wissenschaftlichen Socialismus unserer Zeit angesehen.

English translation: Rodbertus is nowadays rightly regarded as the intellectual father of the scientific socialism of our time.

Böhm-Bawerk credits Rodbertus with ideas subsequently borrowed by Marx and Lassalle. His respect for Rodbertus’s depth and seriousness coexists with an explicit judgment that his writings contain many errors. That combination establishes the review’s criterion: a useful presentation should make an important thinker accessible without sacrificing the clarity of his original arguments.

Kozak’s laborious compilation fails this test. Its attempt to preserve original wording while imposing a systematic order breaks existing connections; abridgment further diminishes freshness and intelligibility. The resulting uncertainty concerns not only arrangement but attribution:

Da man überdies fast nie weiss, ob man es gerade mit eigenen Worten von Rodbertus oder mit freien Ergänzungen von Kozak zu thun hat, so wird das vorliegende Buch wohl Niemandem, der sich mit den Ansichten von Rodbertus vertraut machen will, die Mühe ersparen, auf die Originalschriften zurückzugehen.

English translation: Since, moreover, one almost never knows whether one is dealing with Rodbertus's own words or with free supplements by Kozak, the present book will hardly spare anyone who wishes to make himself familiar with Rodbertus's views the trouble of going back to the original writings.

The review ends with a practical alternative: a collected edition of Rodbertus’s writings, equipped with a good index and perhaps a few dozen notes, would have served economically educated readers better and required less effort. Its central distinction is between preserving words and preserving intelligible argument. Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism makes editorial mediation itself the issue: systematic organization is no gain when it destroys context and blurs the boundary between an author’s statements and an expositor’s additions.