57/08

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Correspondence between Michael and Karl.

To Michael, 13 October 1943

[1] Dear Misi - The very feel of life is riffrend with your letters widening the scene of thought and keeping it warn with the touch of friendship. My visiting toby, I am afraid, is linring lommlepemerate arlia sensible. [...]

[2]

Yes, I will certainly come and see you in Manchester. I was very sorry there was no time to talk about your book plan. In my correction my theses allow of very different interpretations as to their relevance to the total context of human life & society.

Ilona’s cure is progressing not badly on the whole.

We were both {filled} with joy and happiness at our wonderful meetings.

Karli

To Michael, 25 October 1943

Dear Misi - The very feel of life is {riffrend} with your letters widening the scene of thought and keeping it warn with the touch of friendship.

My visiting {toby}, I am afraid, is {linring lommlepemerate arlia} sensible. It always happens when my heart is causing trouble. But it is ___ ___ I have got quite ___ to it. When your birthday letter arrived this morning – we had both forgotten the occasion – it was like a brotherly hug.

I saw Cole yesterday. He had arranged for a long {muristurbed} chat, and his sensitive poetic personality filed the atmosphere with a peculiar quiet which we (Ilona) enjoyed intensively. Of course we agree very much in __ general outlook, and the reasons which make me feel hopeful about the {wved} (although he delights in the liberal glown of the M.G. or N.S. type}

It ____ not be easy to sum up what I believe to be his impression of my work. (For this also to come up, in the last hour of our stay.) Maybe a number of points seemed [4] both interesting … …economy as an episode; the comparative novelty of individual fear of hunger or an organizing {jailor} in industry; the Speenhamland origins of classical economics; some more interesting than plausible (the identity of the “initial” and the “final” problems of model economy; in others words: that the misvalued problems of the 1820's explain the crisis of the 1920’s); many more, I suppose merely plausible, without being specially interesting. He appeared completely at home in the details of 1780-1830 industrial history. Only at one point did I feel did he bring up facts {moved} cause me to qualify my statements, – fortunately, not on an essential point. He seemed, I felt, enthusiastic about my return to institutionalism and keenly looking toward to any thing that {anew} make academic scholarship sit up. Ye he might be dissatisfied with the awful sweep of my statements made sometimes on evidence if a most general nature, and even extremely dissatisfied with some of my lines of argument, for all I know. [...]

[5] You are of course quite right that in your instances the term society is useless and should be substituted by the “individuals in question”. Confe Bentham and Spencer, Fr. Wieser on foreign trade, similarly Haberler and Mises, all round. There is here no society, – questions as to its continued existence are meaningless. But then you showed not have proceeded to speak of “countries”, not have referred to “tariffs” (which simply involve removal from country to country.

[…]

[7] Th Schumpeter! His book is of little interest. He is an apologia for a life twne of crypto-Marxism, with the silliest reasons imaginable given for his expectancies that capitalism is now gwing to dissolve, and that is H V M ! However, his explanation of the justification of monopolies is excellent, & entirely on my views.

I am engage in clearing up one small corner of the field: how to relativise again the economic concern, and subordinate it to those greater concerns that are looming ahead. We have absolutized the economy and are helpless when called upon to handle it as a mere tool, a secondary concern.

To Michael, 13 October 1943 (2)

[8]

To Michael, 3 November 1945

[10]

To Michael, July 1949

[19]

To Michael, 25 February 1952

[20]

To Michael, 23 February 1956

[21]

To Michael, 29 February 1956

[23] Your “M. of M.” is ingenious, precise and, in my view, correct. A conjuncture of the two passions of the modern age: science and morality makes Marxist dialectics auto-reinforcing. However, your formula merely shows why it can be so. In other words, you describe the double aspect of all effective faiths, not the specific effect of the Marxist one. Your problem has been to my knowledge solved by the Princeton (theologian Jewish), Taubes, author of Abendländische Eschatologie.

To Michael, 29 February 1956

[23]

From Michael, 15 October 1956

[24]

To Michael, 21 January 1957

[28]

To Michael, 5 January 1958

[1] [31] My dear brother -

A 17 page letter (plus enclosure) mailed beginning of December and addressed to you[r] university address must have got lost – what a pity. I was elaborating on my old discussion with Mises, on the “young Hegel” (G. Lukacs, 1948[2]); the early Marx (“New Reasoner” n°2) and similar topicalities. Also I warmed you off your Lenin myth concerning Marx's 1875 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'. It was translated by P. Struve into Russian about 1893 or 94 and became focal to Lenin's early work on the Program of the Russian Soc.-Dem. Party, which he drafted in prison, starting with 1895.

Thanks for the Norman Cohen book. He makes out a case for the very late start of social revolutionary movements under the aegis of popular milleninism. This is both new and important (ca. 1380 A.D., pages 209, 213 ff.)

Interest in Ilona's is on the increase. W. Auden is undertaking to look the position in the U.S.; the Canadians are well started; a selection of some half-dozen show pieces are supposed to be published soon in a literary periodical. […] Maybe I have been overfeeding on Hegel these days, which has made unduly partial to Marx.

[32]

P.S. on Lenin. You may be of course right (newly published letters or something - in scholarship everything is possible) but expresly looked up 'State & Revolution' and found the jibes against bourgeois scholars unrelated to this matter. Or did you simply rely on a 'reliable informant'? In that case he did you a bad turn, so it looks to me.

On the Mises conundrum there’s a very interesting comment in Maurice Dobb’s Introduction to the second edition of his own monograph on USSR economy. He gives valid reasons why good economics (i.e. of his own non-Marxian sort) do not to the Soviet economy! (He had bean called to b the C.P. for his neo-classical economics. He insisted on keeping to it, and proceeded to explain why it would new fit Russian conditions anyway. This important paper has been overlooked, I am afraid.) (Incidentally, his econ. history of condition is ______ons).

To Michael, 21 October 1959

[34] Misi dear,

Your withdrawal to Merton brought us a letter (Ilona's) of the kind that helps life all round. There were those years when I – my confused self – had you living beside me, a young saint; there was some selflessness store inside me, but all it produced …

But the Hungarian have my affection.

[35] I remember the depths from which they rose: A Magyar-Jewish mongrel, not deserving to be fully accepted as morally civilized, bearing the 'stamp' of the ethically defective, victime of the backyards standards of a church and aristocracy, whose heart (?) was elsewhere. A nobility, fitted with false pride, but without self-respect, linked to the West by a half-assimilated Jewry, not truly Western, and yet hindered in melting into the Magyar stock, in joining together the healthy ingredients of both into a mixture pregnant with possibilities of a great Eastern European people. (The Galilei was the only approximation of an entelechy of Russia's revolutionary Jewish emancipation.) And yet the Magyar stock too was denaturalized by the hothouse brood of a second-class foreign intelligentsia which pre-digested the valuable Western experiences Hungary required to nourish its peasant stock's rich undergrowth. (Maybe the throne was the

To Michael, 2 January 1960

[37]

To Michael, 14 January 1961

[38]

To Michael, 4 March 1961

[39]

To Michael, 8 April 1961

[42]

To Michael without date (1)

[44]

To Michael without date (2)

[48]

To Michael without date (3)

[49]

To Michael without date (4)

[51]

Notes and references

  1. This is a copy, the original is in the MPP.
  2. Der junge Hegel - Über die Beziehungen von Dialektik und Ökonomie, 1948.