“Of their meeting neither Marx nor Proudhon has left any considerable record. We know from Marx that they had “long discussions which sometimes went on all through the night”. (…) Marx claimed: “I infected him, to his great detriment, with a Hegelianism which he could not go deeply into because he did not know German”. It was quite true that Proudhon could not read German and he could not read Hegel’s work in French because it had not yet been translated, but he had been infected with Hegelianism years before he met Marx. As early as 1839 he was writing to a friend: “Hegel’s logic, such as I understand it to be, satisfied my reason infinitely more than all the old apothegms which have been stuffed into us from our childhood to account for the irregularities in our reasoning and in the community”. Later he was reinfected with Hegelianism, but not so much by Marx as by one of Marx’s ‘bêtes-noires’, Karl Grün. Marx’s version of this was that “the work which I had begun was continued after my expulsion from France by Karl Grün, and this professor of German philosophy had the advantage over me in that he understood nothing of what he was teaching”. It would have been surprising if in their long discussions Marx had as much influence on Proudhon as Proudhon on Marx. The Frenchman was thirty-five years-old, the German twenty-five; (…)” [J. Hampden Jackson, Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism, 1967]