ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Marx’s mathematical manuscripts: a reassessment
Author: ALCOUFFE Alain, Wells Julian
Throughout his life Marx displayed a great interest in mathematics, a fact well known since it was emphatically pointed out by Engels in his speech at Marx's funeral (1883). Much less widely appreciated is Marx's engagement with probabilism and statistics, but this too can be shown to have been a concern from the beginning of his career. In both cases, however, it is possible to identify anticipations of ideas which were only later to be developed by specialists – non-standard analysis, in mathematics, and a recognition of the importance of non-Gaussian distributions, in statistics. In mathematics parts of Marx's researches remain unpublished, although much of this work, especially that which is without doubt the most original, was published and submitted to the evaluation of mathematicians, partially in the 1930s and in a German Russian edition in 1968. The reception of this work has long been limited for various reasons: Marxist economists or planners have often shown great restraint even hostility to the use of mathematics, a consequence of which has been a long delayed publication, yet to be completed; non-Marxist economists found in his laborious calculations an argument-to discard his arguments, while, for mathematicians, the most purely mathematical aspects of these pages seemed disconnected from the contemporary calculus. The first extensive publication of the Mathematical Manuscripts happened in 1968 and did not get much echoed during the three following decades despite variously annotated editions were subsequently published in German, (Endemann 1976), English (Aronson Meo 1983), Portuguese (Gerdes 1983) French (Alcouffe 1985), (a larger annotated English translation is Pradip Baksi’s one, Kolkatta 1994). More recently several scholars (Kennedy, Gerdes, Matthews, Barot, Carchedi, Ponzio and many others) intended to read more carefully the manuscripts from several points of views (mathematics, economics, and philosophy). In contrast Marx’s interest in statistical and probabilistic ideas has scarcely been documented, let alone assessed, although it ranges in time from his doctoral dissertation, through his notes on Mill and his polemic against Proudhon, to Capital, especially in volumes one and three. An ironic consequence of this is that the work which has done most to interest present-day Marxist economists in probabilistic approaches (Farjoun and Machover 1983) itself fails to recognise the extent and significance of statistical thinking of Marx’s presentation in Capital
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