ABSTRACT
The Preface remarks that ‘every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences’. This could be an indirect reference to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel concern in the Science of Logic with ‘the difficulty of finding a beginning in philosophy’, especially as, for Hegel; this was also a science, indeed, a pure science. In contrast to the 1857 Introduction with its focus on method in political economy, the 1867 Preface highlights method in the natural sciences. Karl Marx and Engels believed in the unity of the natural and human sciences. Marx and Engels were opposed to making categorical political arguments based on analogies with biology and other natural sciences. Marx’s idea that the commodity is the ‘economic cell-form’ of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) also provides a possible mediating link between the scientific presentation of Marx’s critique of the CMP and his use of Hegel’s Logic as a rhetorical – or coquettish – device in presenting this argument.
