Daily Inspiration Quote by Rudolf Hilferding

A barb like this works because it pretends to be a calm observation while smuggling in an indictment. Hilferding isn’t merely reporting that Volume III of Marx’s Capital landed with a thud in academic economics; he’s accusing “bourgeois economic science” of strategic incuriosity. The phrase “hardly any impression” implies not just neglect, but an impermeability - a discipline trained to let certain ideas bounce off, especially ones that threaten its social function.

The timing matters. Volume III, edited and published by Engels in 1894, deals with the messy conversion of labor values into market prices, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the architecture of capitalist crisis - exactly the terrain where critics claimed Marx was weakest and where mainstream economists could have engaged most fruitfully. Hilferding, writing as a Marxist economist in an era when neoclassical theory was professionalizing itself, suggests the silence is telling: if bourgeois economics is a science, why does it avoid the most comprehensive critique of its object?

Subtext: this is about power disguised as method. “Bourgeois” isn’t just an insult; it names an institutional position. Economics, in Hilferding’s view, isn’t neutrally mistaken; it is structurally incentivized to treat capitalism as a set of technical problems rather than a historical system with antagonisms and endpoints. The line also doubles as a rallying point for Marxists: if the academy won’t grapple with Marx on the merits, then the task of serious analysis - of finance, crisis, and class interest - must be carried forward outside the sanctioned canon.