Ludwig von Mises on Rodbertus’s Letters to Schumacher

Ludwig von Mises’s book review, originally published in 1927, assesses the edition of Carl Rodbertus-Jagetzow’s letters to Schumacher prepared by Robert Michels and Ernst Ackermann. Its central judgment concerns the value of historical scholarship: this edition illuminates substantive economic and political problems instead of accumulating biographical trivia.

Man kommt heute Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte des Sozialismus mit einem gewissen Mißtrauen entgegen.

English translation: Today one approaches publications on the history of socialism with a certain mistrust.

Mises explains this distrust through examples of scholarship devoted to Lassalle’s personal relationships or Marx’s school essays. The Rodbertus edition earns his praise because its correspondence addresses the questions central to its author’s thought:

Sie handeln in erster Linie vom landwirtschaftlichen Kreditwesen, vom Rentenprinzip, dann aber auch von der »sozialen« Frage und von anderen politischen und nationalökonomischen Dingen.

English translation: They deal in the first place with agricultural credit and with the rent principle, but then also with the "social" question and with other political and economic matters.

The review does not expound or endorse Rodbertus’s economic doctrines. It values the letters as evidence through which those doctrines and their political setting become more intelligible. Mises regrets that Schumacher’s replies are unavailable, but this limitation does not overturn his favorable assessment.

Aber auch so bilden die Briefe eine außerordentlich interessante und lehrreiche Erläuterung zu Rodbertus' Lehren und politischen Ideen.

English translation: But even so the letters constitute an extraordinarily interesting and instructive elucidation of Rodbertus' doctrines and political ideas.

Their significance also extends to German history in the first years after the foundation of the Reich. Mises thus links the interpretation of economic ideas to the historical circumstances documented by correspondence.

The closing portion evaluates the edition’s scholarly apparatus. Its 150-page appendix supplies unpublished or otherwise difficult-to-obtain documents needed to understand the letters. Michels’s extensive introduction, “Rodbertus und sein Kreis,” receives equally strong praise: Dietzel’s study, published four decades earlier, has become substantially outdated, leaving a need for a fresh account. The review’s progression—from suspicion of antiquarian triviality to approval of correspondence, supporting documents, and contextual interpretation—makes its criterion of relevance clear. Historical editing succeeds when it clarifies consequential ideas and their setting.