- First and only edition of highly influential work by the German philosopher and sociologist Friedrich Albert Lange [1828-1875]. Karl Marx read the work extensively during his research on the second volume of Das Kapital and was greatly inspired by it, especially in regard to rent theory and soil exhaustion. He prepared excerpts in his notebook kept between August 1867 and September 1868. Nietzsche described this book in a letter to Muschacke as 'without a doubt the most significant philosophical work to have appeared in the last hundred years' Nietzsche was introduced to Darwin via Lange, which became a pivotal event in the construction of his theory of the Übermensch. Lange was one of the originators of "physiological neo-Kantianism" and an important figure in the founding of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He played a significant role in the German labour movement and in the development of social democratic thought. He articulated a socialist Darwinism that was an alternative to early Social Darwinism. Marx read Lange's book at the beginning of 1868, and it is no coincidence that his notebook focuses on its fourth chapter, where Lange discusses the problems of rent theoryand soil exhaustion. Specifically, Marx noted Lange's observation that Carey and Dühring denounced "trade" with England as a cause of all evils and regarded a "protective tariff" as the ultimate "panacea," without Lange's recognizing that "industry" possesses a "centralizing tendency," which creates not only the division of town and country but also economic inequality. Similar to Roscher, Lange argued that "despite the natural scientific correctness of Liebig's theory ," robbery cultivation can be justified from a "national economic" perspective. Stammhammer I: 125, 1. Die Bibliotheken von Marx und Engels (MEGA IV.32), no. 722.