Postface: From Rudolf Hilferding to Eugen Varga—Towards a Further Book Project

Abstract

The concluding chapter explains the editors’ interest in a critical re-reading of the works of Eugen Varga. As a former admirer and comrade, and later as a radical critic of Rudolf Hilferding, Varga has been an excellent connoisseur of Hilferding’s texts. Re-reading and critically evaluating Varga’s critique of Hilferding, as well as Varga’s own rich empirical material on the societal and economic development of specific countries, helps us to further deal with Hilferding in a productive way. Varga’s analyses are also referring to developments after Hilferding’s flight from Germany in 1933 and his tragic death in February 1941, up to Varga’s own end in October 1964. Their critical re-reading can help to improve current work in political economy concerning economic and political processes. This re-reading will also demonstrate that Varga was not ‘Stalin’s Economist’.

This brief text by the editors is, at the same time, a special kind of call for abstracts or papers for the next volume in the series, inviting contributions to a productive critique of the work of a great internationalist economist and a historical personality.