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26 This explanation is partly and perhaps largely correct, namely, in that the mature Marx’s tendency in research led to a clear separation of criticism and theory. However, as I have said, I do not think that is the whole story: in the beginning, in his youthful project in economics, Marx had not distinguished between the positive treatment – the ‘real treatment’, as he put it – and the critical treatment, the study of the literature. And not only in the beginning: in the 22 February 1858 letter to Lassalle cited above, Marx wrote: The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy.

The vocabulary and tone even suggest a methodology contrary to the Young-Hegelian methodology: I cannot, of course, avoid all critical consideration of other economists, in particular a polemic against Ricardo in as much as even he, qua bourgeois, cannot but commit blunders even from a strictly economic viewpoint. 24 Marx 1983c, p. 261. 25 Thus, in 1858 Marx had abandoned the Young-Hegelian identification of science with critique. He had overcome it on the level of methodological principles, but some remnants of it remain throughout his later work, including Capital.

Among Marx scholars who scarcely identify, if at all, with his philosophical and political thought, Schumpeter and Morishima are probably the ones who have most appreciated, in very different ways, the systematic grandeur of Marx’s work. Joan Robinson too. She thinks, incidentally, that Marx learned from Ricardo the scientific ideal of the system, of theory in the strong sense. I find it impossible to be convinced of this, despite the devoted admiration with which I read Mrs. Robinson, for two reasons.