Abstract
Philosophically interesting examples of variations not noted in the MECW's more succinct editorial work include the substitutions of "materialism" for "realism", of "empirical" for "actual", and of "actual" for "true" in Marx's Contributions to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (MEGA I, Vol. 2, pp. 49, 65, 66; noted in Apparat pp. 595-7). Marx's notes and commentaries from the 1870s on Edouard Hospitalier include the following trilingual assessment of the potentials of electricity: "einen electrische Strom, der hat une certaine tension or force electro-motnce" (MEGA IV, Vol. 31, p. 467), and the following excerpt from William Thomson's 1867 treatise on natural philosophy defining kinematics as "nach Ampère's Vorschlag the purely geometrical science of motion in the abstract" (ibid., p. 478). Often this lack of rigor was no fault of the authors, who were working with degraded or incomplete texts and who deserve credit for their attempts to reckon with Marx and Engels in a political context that was very hostile.