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It is evident that the Communist Manifesto has had more staying power than many other nineteenth-century political tracts. It did not have, for example, the short life experienced by contemporaneous political writings in America where, as Tocqueville reported, political parties were in the habit of fighting each other by publishing "pamphlets which circulate at an incredible rate, last a day, and die" (1966,470). Of course, the Manifesto was not an immediate best-seller. In fact, as Eric Hobsbawm (1998, 5) most recently noted, in the period from 1850 to the early 1860s, probably no one would have prognosticated great future for this text by Marx and Engels, published anonymously and printed in a small run. It remained practically unnoticed (except among some German elements) during the turbulent year of 1848, and without any influence on the February revolution in France (cf. Rubel 1956, 10; Kagi 1968, 310-- 1). And yet the Manifesto, with its hundreds of later editions and many translations, was destined after all to become part of world literature. It might thus have been a prescient act for its authors to announce, in the preamble, the imminence of English, French, Italian, Flemish, and Danish editions (Marx and Engels 1998, 34). Be that as it may, this was not the product of an arrogant belief by the two young authors that they had produced a work of international stature. The very origin of the Manifesto was in fact marked by circumstances that, at the time, were completely novel. On 24 January 1848, the central committee of the Communist League had sent from London a letter to the Brussels Committee (Marx was in Brussels at the time), requesting delivery of the text by the first of February, and threatening, in "energetic" and even "rude" terms, serious consequences for citizen Marx, who had been charged to produce the text, in the event that text was not delivered on time (Mehring 1962, 143). Upon reflection, these circumstances seem paradoxical: "This pertains to Marx, and to the Manifesto!-it has been written-but it is a matter as well, and most of all, of the first communist party in history, and it is this party that demands the Manifesto from Marx." The text therefore is not the product of "a solitary...