Zeitung;” finally, the debates on free trade and protection, gave me the first impulse to take up the study of economic questions. At the same time a weak, quasi-philosophic echo of French socialism and communism made itself heard in the “Rheinische Zeitung” in those days when the good intentions “to go ahead” greatly outweighed knowledge of facts. I declared myself against such botching, but had to admit at once in a controversy with the “Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung” that my previous studies did not allow me to hazard an independent judgment as to the merits of the French schools. When, therefore, the publishers of the “Rheinische Zeitung” conceived the illusion that by a less aggressive policy the paper could be saved from the death sentence pronounced upon it, I was glad to grasp that opportunity to retire to my study room from public life.
The first work undertaken for the solution of the question that troubled me, was a critical revision of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Law”; the introduction to that work appeared in the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” published in Paris in 1844. I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and French of the eighteenth century under the name “civic society;” the anatomy of that civic society is to be sought in political economy. The study of the latter which I had taken up in Paris, I continued at Brussels whither I emigrated on account of an order of expulsion issued by Mr. Guizot. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, continued to serve as the leading thread in my studies, may be briefly summed up as follows: In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of