Liudvig Zinovevich Slonimskii

Born 1850; died Jan. 12, 1918. Russian economist, lawyer, and publicist.

Slonimskii graduated from the faculty of law at the University of Kiev in 1872. From the 1870’s to the 1890’s he wrote for a number of Russian newspapers and journals, including Vestnik Evropy (Journal of Europe). He is known for his polemic against the liberal Narodniki, a polemic in which he revealed his lack of understanding of differentiation among the peasantry and defended small peasant agriculture from a liberal-bourgeois point of view. Slonimskii was one of the first Russian economists to call attention to the work of the mathematical economists, such as A.-A. Cournot in France and J. H. von Thü-nen in Germany, and to stress the fruitfulness of applying mathematical methods to economic research. He criticized Marx’ economic system from the standpoint of vulgar political economy. Slonimskii’s anti-Marxist articles were published as a separate book, The Economic Doctrine of Karl Marx (1898), which is an extremely reactionary work.