Towards an Intellectual Biography of N.I. Sieber

TOWARDS AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY OF N.I. SIEBER François ALLISSON* and Federico D’ONOFRIO** *Senior Lecturer, Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, e-mail: [email protected] **Senior SNF Researcher, Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, e-mail: [email protected] Nikolay Ivanovich Sieber (1844-1888) is known as the Russian economist who introduced the economic theories of Karl Marx in Russia, and who first translated David Ricardo into the Russian language. But there are some gaps in the traditional historiography about his biography. First, he is said to have resigned from his position of professor of economics at the University of Kiev for protesting against the dismissal of his friend, the famous Ukrainian nationalist Dragomanov. But not much is known about Sieber’s actual support of the nationalist cause. Second, Sieber’s father is a Swiss citizen and Sieber spent a decade in Switzerland. But while most of his published works (all in Russian) were written in Switzerland, nothing is known about his life in that country. Third, Sieber lived almost all his life as an “independent researcher”, and had a reputation of an armchair economist. But nothing is known about how he materially survived all these years, and how he published his works in Russia from Switzerland. This paper, written in the context of the preparation of an English translation of Sieber’s main opus “Ricardo’s theory of value and capital” (1871), is an attempt to fill these gaps, using primary materials gathered in several archives in Switzerland (mostly Bern and Zürich), in the Ukraine, in Russia and in the Netherlands (mainly official acts and correspondence). Among the difficulties encountered during the research and evoked in the paper, one is discussed: how to write the intellectual biography of an economist that left few traces? Keywords: Nikolai Sieber; intellectual biography; network; Switzerland; Russia; Ukrainian nationalism SKETCHY DRAFT - NO QUOTE PLEASE BUT COMMENTS WELCOME! 1 Niclaus Sieber (1844–1888), or Nikolaj Ivanovich Sieber, or N. I. Ziber, is known in the Soviet historiography for being one of the very first readers of Marx, and his name is associated with the early development of Russian Marxism, and as the translator of Ricardo in Russia. An edition of his collected works was even published in two volumes during the Soviet period (Sieber, 1959). His name is not well-known outside Russia, although he lived in both Imperial Russia and in Switzerland, mainly because he apparently published only in the Russian language. (We will return on this “apparently later.) In Russia, Sieber’s influence was considered very widespread. As far as Ricardo is concerned, Sieber offered the first comprehensive interpretation of its theory of value and capital in his 1871 dissertation (Sieber 1871). His translations of Ricardo’s Principles (1873) and Works (1882) with his commentaries were often the only way for many Russians to get access to Ricardo’s work. Almost all Russian economists quoted Sieber’s translation explicitly, and Lenin is no exception to the rule. The material impact is far greater where Marx is concerned. In his 1871 dissertation, Sieber analyses Marx’s economic theory of value, money and the analysis of commodities for the first time in Russian literature. This reading of Marx’s first volume of Capital appeared one year before the Russian translation of the original (Marx [1867] 1872). And when the original was temporarily banned through censorship, Sieber’s digest of Capital was still available and played the role of a substitute (Zweynert 2002, 4.8.5). In addition to being physically more accessible, Sieber’s exposition style was easier to read and understand than the original. Moreover, and this is an important endorsement, Marx himself praised Sieber’s 1871 dissertation in the « Afterword to the Second German Edition » of Capital’s first volume (1873): An excellent Russian translation of « Das Kapital » appeared in the spring of 1872. The edition of 3,000 copies is already nearly exhausted. As early as 1871, N. Sieber, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Kiev, in his work « David Ricardo’s Theory of Value and of Capital », referred to my theory of value, of money and of capital, as in its fundamentals a necessary sequel to the teaching of Smith and Ricardo. That which astonishes the Western European in the reading of this excellent work, is the author’s consistent and firm grasp of the purely theoretical position. (Marx [1873] 1906, 21) Sieber’s role in popularising Marx’s work was important, especially for the first generation of Russian Marxists, and even further, since his work represented, and still represents a « valuable coda » to Capital (Smith 2001, 48) which surpasses Kautsky’s popular volume on Marx (Guelfat 1970, 144). On this point, the Soviet historiography is consistent with contemporary views on Sieber as the first scientific 2 interpreter of Marx and the first Marx propagandist in Russia. For instance, in the most comprehensive bibliographical resource on Sieber to date, Rezul gives the following rather hagiographic statement on Sieber’s achievements: « 1. Sieber was the first to popularise and comment the doctrines of Marx in Russia and in the Ukraine. 2. Sieber was the author of the first Marxist work on the history of primitive economic culture […]. 3. Sieber was the first to translate Ricardo into Russian and therefore to give access to this great pre-Marxist economist. » (Rezul 1931, 142–143). The list goes on and credits Sieber for the first Marxist evaluations of Rodbertus and of Henry George’s works, for the first sceptical Marx-based approach towards the obshchina, etc. His doctoral dissertation on Ricardo’s theory of value and capital (Sieber 1871) together with some papers on Marx’s economic theory appeared together in his most famous work, David Ricardo and Karl Marx in their Socio-Economic Researches (1885). This was to become a bedside book for generations of Russian Marxists. The best illustration of this fact is perhaps contained in Lenin’s following footnote, added to the 1908 edition of his 1897 Characterisation of Economic Romanticism: The word « realist » was used here instead of the word Marxist exclusively for censorship reasons. For the same reason, instead of referring to Capital, we referred to Sieber’s book, which summarised Marx’s Capital. (Lenin [1908] 1972, 188) Readers who were able to read between the lines (more on this later) saw Sieber as a proxy for Marx. But besides this role of popularising and disseminating the theories of Ricardo and Marx, Sieber was also conveying his own interpretation of classical political economy. He was becoming a Marxist. Thanks to the work of several pioneering scholars (Guelfat 1970; Scazzieri 1987; Kappeler 1989; White 1996, 2001, 2009, 2011; Smith 2001), the name of Sieber is starting to become known outside Russia. But except for two papers translated by White (Sieber 2001, 2011), his work still remains inaccessible for a non-Russian audience. The present paper is part of a joint project between a Swiss-team (the two co-authors of the present paper) and a Russian team (Danila Raskov, Leonid Shirokorad and Aleksandr Dubyansky) that aims at overcoming this sorry state of affair in two main steps. First, the project aims at providing a wider access to Sieber’s main economic work. Out of the two editions of his PhD dissertation, Ricardo’s theory of value and capital (Sieber 1871) and David Ricardo and Karl Marx in their socio-economical researches (1885), we favoured the early 1871 view on Marx’s Capital as Sieber’s most needed text. We will offer a critical English edition of this text, with a historical and an 3 analytical introduction, to make this end-of-nineteenth century Russian text easier to grasp for an English language twenty-first century reader, as well as editors and translators notes, to provide the necessary elements of context and on concepts of this 300 pages masterpiece. Second, the project aims at providing Sieber’s first intellectual biography. The man is discreet, leave scarce information behind him, and there some interesting controversies about his real role. Besides a biographical essay, which implies archival work in both Switzerland and Russia for the many elements that are still missing on Sieber’s life, and an updated bibliography based on the already comprehensive but quite dated version by Rezul (1931), it will contain an evaluation of his economic work in light of his even lesser known but numerous writings in sociology, anthropology, economic history and law about various subjects mainly aimed at analysing the economic development of societies. This will contain an interpretation of his reconstruction of classical political economy (thus providing Sieber’s renewed historiographical account of classical political economy), a characterisation of his economic vision on development, and an assessment of his legacy. This paper is part of the latter objective, and is a first step towards Sieber’s intellectual biography. It is not yet a coherent whole, but it already provides some pieces of the puzzle we are trying to assemble. And more than definitive results, this paper addresses some chosen topics with even more questions to come. Before entering into these aspects of Sieber’s intellectual biography, it is necessary to remind some known facts about his life course. Born in 1844 as a Swiss citizen in Russia, he studied in Simferopol and Kiev (at the time in the Russian empire, nowadays in the Ukraine), where he studied political economy. He published his dissertation in 1871, and then was sent to study further abroad. He traveled and studied in 1871-1872 in Europe (notably in Germany and Switzerland), and became dozent then professor at the University of Kiev.

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