Die Agrarfrage: eine Uebersicht über die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirthschaft und die Agrarpolitik der Sozialdemokratie.

£3,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A presentation copy of Karl Kautsky’s (1854-1938) most “original contribution to Marxian theory” ( New Palgrave ), inscribed by the author “Meinen lieben Hugo in alter Freundschaft Berlin 3/1 99 K. Kautsky” in black ink to the title page. A pioneering study of agrarian relations of production under capitalism, it was celebrated by Lenin in an enthusiastic review published in the Russian Marxist periodical Nachalo as “the most important event in present-day economic literature since the third volume of Capital. Until now Marxism has lacked a systematic study of capitalism in agriculture. Kautsky has filled this gap”. Unfortunately, the identity of the recipient remains obscure, but the most likely candidate is the Viennese socialist and publisher Hugo Heller (1870-1923), a long-term friend and correspondent of Kautsky’s. Heller worked alongside Kautsky in Berlin as an editor for the influential socialist periodical Die Neue Zeit , the official organ of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 1905, Heller returned to Vienna to start his own publishing house and would go on to publish some of Sigmund Freud’s most important early works, becoming a prominent member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The Karl Kautsky Papers at the International Institute of Social History contains 229 items pertaining to their correspondence from 1894 onwards. Die Agrarfrage represented an important contribution to the then-hotly contested question of the persistence of small private farm h

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