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The long-lost "Fourth Brussels Notebook": a substantive manuscript, mainly in French, written during the highly productive spring of 1845, when Marx in his Brussels exile embarked on the preliminary studies for his "Kritik der politischen Ökonomie" and the "Kapital". Nearly two decades later, while preparing the "Kapital" manuscript, Marx added ten pages of calculations and mathematical notes: like most of the excerpts in the earlier portions of the volume, they would be included to a large extent in his magnum opus. One of the last great Marx manuscripts in private hands and the most extensive specimen to appear in the trade for 80 years. The unifying theme of this excerpt book based on French and British economists is clearly that of money, trade, and credit, as well as the concept and role of capital. "Indeed, Marx was not only interested in abstract, theoretical notions, but also in specific information as to various countries. Material about France he found in Dupré de Saint Maur, about the Netherlands in De Pinto, about Russia especially in Storch" (cf. MEGA IV/3, p. 463). His attention was focused on "the basic concerns of classical political economy: the nature of wealth and its sources, the role of work, the nature of value and its relation to price, the role of money etc." Marx's desire to "acquire as extensive a knowledge as possible" is evident (cf. ibid., p. 461). - The notebook links up with a slightly earlier, similar volume in which Marx had collected excerpts, ending with extracts from the German-Baltic economist Heinrich von Storch. The present ms. begins with excerpts from Storch's "Cours d'économie politique" (Paris 1824f.), namely from vol. 3, pt. 2 ("Considérations sur la nature de revenu national") and from the final volume (notes by J.-B. Say). These are followed by brief extracts from N. F. Dupré de St. Maur's "Essai sur les monnoies" (Paris 1746), to which Marx would make no reference later. After this, he prepared extensive extracts from Isaac de Pinto's "Traité de la circulation et du credit" (Amsterdam 1771) - an influential work that endorsed public debt, division of labour, the issue of bank notes, and stock exchange trading. The "Traité" included several additional, shorter works, and Marx prepared extracts of varying length from all of them. He would quote from these in several of his own works, including the first volume of the "Kapital". These passages are followed by similarly extensive extracts from Josiah Child's "Traites sur le commerce" (Berlin 1754, a French translation of the 1693 "New Discourse About Trade"). This work, widely read until well into the second half of the 18th century, argued for low interest rates and for strengthening the balance of foreign trade. Marx made excerpts from the entire work and used them in the third book of his "Kapital". He occasionally interrupts these excerpts to include short notes of his own - comments that explain the reason for including each text and that are invaluable for understanding Marx's creative method. Ten additional pages contain mathematical calculations probably penned during the years 1861/63 while Marx was working on the "Kapital" manuscript and which relate to the rates of surplus value and profit (second book). Some, however, refer to the 1850s housekeeping costs of the Marx family and thus are of biographical interest. - The year 1845 also marks the beginning of the collaboration between Marx and Engels: that very spring they published their first joint effort, "Die heilige Familie". The Brussels years produced groundbreaking works such as "Thesen über Feuerbach" and "Die deutsche Ideologie". While not published until much later, they first formulated central elements of historical materialism. Brussels is also the place where principal parts of the "Communist Manifesto" were drafted. - First 3 leaves loose with slight edge damage (no loss to text); generally tightly bound with insignificant edge defects and without any loss to text. Compared with the original condition which still prevailed in the 1920s, the final 3 leaves are missing: these contained extracts from Benjamin Bell's "De la disette" (Geneva 1804, not used by Marx in his own publications or manuscripts) as well as a few calculations, all probably penned somewhat later. Of these three leaves, the final and third-last one are today kept at the Moscow RC (Rossijskij centr chranenija i izucenija dokumentov novejsej istorii; Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History) after having been gifted to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s by the American business manager and philanthropist Armand Hammer (1898-1990). The penultimate leaf is considered lost. - Provenance: In American private collection since 1990; directly acquired from the collector in 2012.