This is a review of Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels: MEGA2, Section IV: Excerpts, Notes, Marginalia. Volume 31: Excerpts and Notes on the Natural Sciences from the middle of 1877 to early 1883, published in 1999.
This volume consists of two books: Texts, and (text-critical) Apparatus. The Texts are divided into two parts. Part I contains Marx’s incomplete excerpts and notes on inorganic and organic chemistry, and electricity (3–473). Part II contains Engels’s excerpts and notes on parts of physics and ecology (475–614). The text-critical Apparatus contains a general introduction to the volume; separate introductions to the subsections of the texts; inventories of variant readings, corrections and comments; a name index; indexes of the literature used by the authors and the editors –– and finally, a subject index (615–1055). The technical standards of editing and production are veritable examples for others to follow.
MEGA2 IV/31 provides new materials related to the hitherto little-noticed natural-science studies of Marx, and some materials related to Engels’s Dialectics of Nature. These materials are of interest for the study of the interrelationships of the natural and social sciences of the nineteenth century, and through them, for the study of the relations of the sciences with the modern movement for socialism.
This review was first published in the Nature, Society, and Thought (Minneapolis), Volume 14, Number 4 (2001): 377-390.
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