Another was Victor Hugo, who is widely considered to be the greatest French novelist of the nineteenth century. Marx and Engels were not the only social critics to adopt and build on Liebig’s views about agriculture and sewers. This “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” formed the basis of their critique of capitalist agriculture, and provides the theoretical starting point for what is now known as metabolic rift theory. As Marx wrote in 1860, “Liebig rightly criticises the senseless wastefulness which robs the Thames of its purity and the English soil of its manure.” They were particularly impressed by his analysis of soil fertility, in which he sharply criticized the use of artificial fertilizers and guano imported from Peru, while hundreds of tons of human excrement was dumped into rivers and the sea. Introduction by Ian Angus - In the 1850s and 1860s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels closely studied the works of Justus von Liebig, the German chemist whose books on agricultural chemistry were enormously influential throughout Europe and North America. Like Marx and Engels, he based his critique on the work of the chemist Justus von Liebig. Victor Hugo’s masterpiece includes a powerful attack on the urban wastefulness that steals nutrients from the land. Jean Valjean carries the wounded revolutionary Marius through the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables.
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