During the forties, the leaven of revolutionary ideas was most vigorously at work in France in the formation of the various secret societies and socialist schools of the followers of Proudhon, Blanqui, Cabet, Louis Blanc, etc. The February revolution and the June proclamation of the 'right to work' led to a first head-on clash between the two worlds of capitalist society--an epoch-making eruption of the contradictions latent in capitalism. As regards the other, visible form of those contradictions--the crises--the available data for observation at the time of the second controversy were far more comprehensive than in the early twenties of the century. The dispute between Rodbertus and v. Kirchmann took place under the immediate impact of the crises in 1837, 1839, 1847, and even of the first world crisis in 1857--Rodbertus writing his interesting pamphlet _On Commercial Crises and the Mortgage Problem of the Landowners_[231] in 1858. Thus the inherent contradictions of capitalist society meeting his eyes were in strident discord with the doctrine of harmony held by the English classics and their vulgarisers both in England and on the Continent, quite unlike any critique in the times when Sismondi had raised his voice in warning. Incidentally, a quotation from Sismondi in Rodbertus' first writing proves that the former's strictures immediately influenced Rodbertus. He was thus familiar with contemporary French writings against the classical school, though perhaps less so with the far more numerous English literature. There is no more than this flimsy support for the myth of the German professors about the so-called 'priority' of Rodbertus over Marx in the 'foundation of socialism'. Accordingly, Professor Diehl writes in his article on Rodbertus in _Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften_: 'Rodbertus must be considered the real founder of scientific socialism in Germany, since in his writings between 1839 and 1842, even before Marx and Lassalle, he provided a comprehensive socialist system, a critique of Adam Smith's doctrine, new theoretical foundations and proposals for social reform.'