undertaken as
a whole by Marx alone and we consider that this investigation
practically sums up all that has been established respecting
theoretical economy prior to that of the bourgeois.

While political economy in a narrow sense arose in the minds of a few
geniuses of the seventeenth century, it is, in its positive
formulation by the physiocrats and Adam Smith, substantially a child
of the eighteenth century, and expresses itself in the acquisitions of
the great contemporary French philosophers with all the excellencies
and defects of that time. What we have said of the French philosophers
applies also to the economists of that day. The new science was with
them not the expression of the condition and needs of the time but the
expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange
discovered by them were not the laws of a given historical form of
those facts but were eternal natural laws; they derived them from the
nature of man. But this man, seen clearly, was a burgher of the Middle
Ages on the high road to becoming a modern bourgeois, and his nature
consisted in this that he had to manufacture commodities and carry on
his trade according to the given historical conditions of that period.

(Herr Duehring having applied the two man theory to political economic
conditions and having decided that such conditions are unjust, upon
which conclusion he bases his revolutionary attitude, Engels remarks
as follows):

"If we have no better security for the revolution in the present
methods of distribution of the products of labor with all their crying
antagonisms of misery and luxury, of poverty and ostentation, than the
consciousness that this method of distribution is unjust and that
justice must finally prevail, we should be in evil plight and would
have to stay there a long time. The mystics of the Middle Ages who
dreamed of an approaching thousand years kingdom of righteousness had
the consciousness of the injustice of class antagonisms. At the
beginning of modern history three hundred years ago, Thomas Muenzer
shouted it aloud to all the world. In the English and French bourgeois
revolutions the same cry was heard and died away ineffectually. And if
the same cry, after the formation of class antagonisms and class
distinctions left the working, suffering classes cold until 1830, if
it now takes hold of one land after another with the same results and
the same intensity, in proportion as the greater industr