ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the position of the Communist Manifesto in the history of scientific sociology and economics and incidentally in Marx's own scientific work. Friedrich Engel's Preface to S. Moore's English translation of the Manifesto dated London, January 30, 1888, tells us all we need to know about the nature of the publication, the conditions under which it appeared, and its fortunes. The chapter introduces a distinction that is not to everyone's taste and entirely non-Marxist, and presents decisive expository advantages, such as, the distinction between economic sociology and economics for the purpose of analyzing the scientific contents of the Manifesto. Policy is politics; and politics is a very realistic matter. Marx never worked out any explicit theory of business cycles, although his writings are full of fragments that his followers have tried to build into one. But it is safe to say that he outgrew both over-production and underconsumption theories, even though traces of both were retained throughout.
