frederick engels socialism utopian and scientific

Providing a brief history of socialist thought from the early modern era onwards, Engels traces the rationalist, democratic and communist movements of the period not simply as a battle of ideas, but rather of the theoretical expressions of the rise and conflict of newly emerging classes in society. The first chapter of Engels’s pamphlet is dedicated to the great “Utopian” Socialists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: the forefathers of Marx’s and Engels’s “Scientific” Socialism. In addition, Engels’s introductions to the pamphlet on “the history of materialism” and the “history of the English middle class” which offer both a valuable explanation and defense of materialist philosophy (itself a revolutionary pursuit considering the enormous influence of idealist and agnostic thinking in “respectable” philosophy), and a masterclass in historical materialism, putting the evolution of philosophy and ideas in its rightful context as part of the underlying revolution in the development of the productive forces and the class struggle. In three brisk chapters Engels deals first with the development of pre-Marxist socialist thought, then dialectical philosophy, which is central to the Marxist method, and finally historical materialism, the application of Marxist thought to the evolution of human society: the source of Marx’s and Engels’s revolutionary conclusions.Īs the very brief synopsis above suggests, this pamphlet is extremely rich in ideas and fully deserves several readings. Socialism: Utopian and Scientificcondenses some of the key ideas in Engels’s book into a concise and very accessible pamphlet, which remains to this day one of the best and most popular summaries of Marxist ideas ever produced. This pamphlet, first produced in French in 1880, is in fact a compilation of three chapters from Engels’s Anti-Duhring, a polemical work produced not only to combat the “new” socialist theories of Eugen Dühring but also, more importantly, “an encyclopedic survey of our conception of the philosophical, natural-science and historical problems” in Engels’s own words.

We present here a reading guide to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which can help comrades digest the key ideas from this classic Marxist text by Friedrich Engels.

Frederick engels socialism utopian and scientific