Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s Review of Georg Adler (1888)

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s review of Georg Adler’s Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx'schen Kritik der bestehenden Volkswirtschaft assesses a wide-ranging study of Marx published in 1887. Its central judgment distinguishes Adler’s valuable exposition from his uneven criticism: clarity and breadth make the book useful, but Adler fails to apply his critical standards consistently to his own theories or to Marx’s other critics.

Böhm-Bawerk first surveys the book’s scope: biography, economic theory introduced through materialist history, criticism of Marx and his critics, investigations of intellectual predecessors, and a bibliography of Marx’s publications. He particularly praises the biographical and expository sections. Adler’s eighty-page account of Marx’s theories offers accessible instruction where, in the reviewer’s judgment, the original writings demand considerable effort. The critical sections receive more qualified approval:

Die kritischen Ausführungen des Verf. sind, soweit sie gegen Marx selbst gerichtet sind, überwiegend scharfsinnig und zutreffend, ohne Anspruch auf Neuheit erheben zu können.

English translation: The author's critical expositions are, so far as they are directed against Marx himself, predominantly acute and apt, without being able to lay claim to novelty.

The distinction between soundness and originality prepares the review’s main objection. Adler’s departures from earlier critics do not necessarily improve their arguments, and his positive account of surplus value reproduces a principle shared with the thinker he attacks:

Auch der Verf. erklärt die „Rente“ — Kapital- und Grundrente — als eine Aneignung unbezahlter Arbeit.

English translation: The author too explains "rent" — interest on capital and ground rent — as an appropriation of unpaid labour.

For Böhm-Bawerk, this agreement exposes Adler’s failure of self-criticism. His variant of exploitation theory faces at least as many objections as Marx’s. Its apparent immunity arises from its sketchiness: elaboration would disclose conflicts between its explanatory principle and the facts. The review thus makes theoretical development a test of consistency, not merely a matter of fuller presentation.

A second asymmetry appears in Adler’s treatment of previous critics. Böhm-Bawerk argues that Adler becomes indulgent toward Marx when assessing others’ objections, accepting weak defenses against charges of logical error while reserving condemnation for his own tribunal. This reverses the earlier failure to recognize defects in his own position. Both objections concern the uneven distribution of critical rigor.

The review nevertheless closes with a favorable overall verdict:

Doch über solche Mängel, die überdies teils in der Schwierigkeit des Stoffes, teils in einer echt menschlichen, und gerade bei einem jungen Autor sehr verzeihlichen Autorenschwäche eine gewisse Entschuldigung finden, darf man gegen das mancherlei Gute, das das Buch gebracht, nicht undankbar werden: im ganzen ist es eine tüchtige und schätzbare Bereicherung der Marx-Litteratur.

English translation: Yet over such defects, which moreover find a certain excuse partly in the difficulty of the material, partly in a thoroughly human authorial weakness that is very pardonable precisely in a young author, one must not become ungrateful for the many good things the book has brought: on the whole it is a competent and estimable enrichment of the Marx literature.

Its significance lies in this discriminating assessment: Böhm-Bawerk recognizes the scholarly service of making Marx intelligible while insisting that opposition to Marx does not itself establish theoretical independence or consistency.