Note 36 — Chapter III · CONCERNING THE INTERPRETATION AND CRITICISM OF SOME CONCEPTS OF MARXISMToC

I may be allowed to remark that in similar discussions, economists usually make the serious mistake of making the concept economic coincide with the concept egoistic. But the economic is an independent sphere of human activity, in addition to all the others, such as the spheres of ethics, æsthetics, logic, etc. The moral goods and the satisfaction of the higher moral needs of man, just because they are goods, and needs, are taken into account in economics, but still only as goods and needs, not as moral or immoral, egoistic or altruistic. In like manner, a manifestation (by words or by any other means of expression) is taken into account in æsthetics; but only as a manifestation not as true, false, moral, immoral, useful, harmful, etc. Economists are still impressed by the fact that Adam Smith wrote one book of theory and of ethics, and another of economic theory; which may interpret to mean that one dealt with a theory of altruistic facts and the other with one of egoistic facts. But if this had been so, Adam Smith would have discussed, in both of his chief works, facts of an ethical character, estimable or reprehensible; and would not have been an economist at all; a ridiculous conclusion which is a reductio ad absurdum of the identification of economic action with egoism.