Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

“The content on the other hand, I think I can assert, will cause German workers few difficulties. In general, only the third section is difficult, but far less so for workers, whose general conditions of life it concerns, than for the “educated” bourgeois. In the many explanatory additions that I have made here, I have had in mind not so much the workers as “educated” readers; persons of the type of the Deputy von Eynern, the Privy Councillor Heinrich von Sybel and other Treitschkes, who are governed by the irresistible impulse to demonstrate again and again in black and white their frightful ignorance and, following from this, their colossal misconception of socialism.”

Here, Engels asserts that, despite the complexity of the book’s ideas, a layperson—such as a German proletarian—should have little trouble parsing his work. By placing “educated” in scare quotes, he makes it clear that he does not regard a lack of formal education as evidence of intellectual inferiority. One of the Engels’s purpose in writing the book was to bring Marx’s ideas out of academia and into the hands of the proletariat.

“The materialist conception of history and its specific application to the modern class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie was only possible by means of dialectics. And if the schoolmasters of the German bourgeoisie have drowned the memory of the great German philosophers and of the dialectics produced by them in a swamp of empty eclecticism—so much so that we are compelled to appeal to modern natural science as a witness to the preservation of dialectics in reality—we German Socialists are proud of the fact that we are descended not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte and Hegel.”

Here, Engels alludes to his synthesis of German dialectics and French utopian socialism. He simultaneously criticizes his contemporary German academics for largely forgoing materialism in favor of idealism. In short, Engels applies the techniques of German philosophy to the goals of French philosophy.

“The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus, became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.”

Engels presents Dühring as a dividing force in Germany’s socialist community. In Engels’s view, Dühring curtailed the party’s growing power by sowing division. Likewise, his “throwing down” of the gauntlet implies a personal attack, to which Marx and Engels had no choice but to respond.