.gif) Title page of the first edition | |
| Author | Friedrich Engels |
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| Original title | Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft |
| Language | German |
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| Publication place | Leipzig,German Empire |
Published in English | 1907 |
| Text | Anti-Dühring atWikisource |
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Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (German:Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft), better known asAnti-Dühring, is a book byFriedrich Engels, published in 1878 and first serialised in the newspaperVorwärts in 1877–1878. The work is apolemical response to the philosophical views ofEugen Dühring, a German philosopher and socialist whose ideas were gaining influence within theSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In countering Dühring, Engels provided a comprehensive and accessible exposition ofMarxism as a "science". The book is divided into three parts—Philosophy, Political Economy, and Socialism—and became a major contribution to the development of Marxism as a systematic and coherent school of thought.
The work was highly influential in the emerging socialist movements of Europe, and was instrumental in defining and popularising concepts such ashistorical materialism anddialectical materialism. A section of the book was later edited and published separately in 1880 as the popular pamphletSocialism: Utopian and Scientific. In the 20th century, some critics, particularly in the tradition ofWestern Marxism, argued thatAnti-Dühring represented a distortion ofKarl Marx's thought, creating a rigid,scientistic dogma that later contributed to the ideology of theSoviet Union. However, Engels's biographers note that Marx was deeply involved in the book's creation, wrote a chapter for it, and endorsed it as an authentic expression of their shared philosophy.
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In the mid-1870s, the ideas ofEugen Dühring, a blind lecturer in philosophy at theUniversity of Berlin, began to gain significant influence within the German socialist movement.[1] His influence grew inside the newly formedSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which had been established at theGotha Congress in 1875 through a merger of theLassalleanGeneral German Workers' Association and the "Eisenacher" party led byAugust Bebel andWilhelm Liebknecht.[2] Dühring's socialism was a critique ofMarxism; he rejected itseconomic determinism and proposed a gradualist political programme focused on more immediate material gains for the working class. His "force theory" emphasised the power of strikes and collective action to achieve social change through autonomous communes (Wirtschaftscommunen).[1] His pragmatic and accessible approach appealed to many German socialists, includingEduard Bernstein, who found the philosophical system ofKarl Marx to be arcane and unrealisable.[1][3] At the time, Dühring was regarded as one of the party's chief theorists.[4]
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Dühring was also an aggressive ideological opponent, dismissing Marx as a "scientific figure of fun" and saving particular scorn forFriedrich Engels, whom he called the "Siamese twin" who had only to look at his own position as a manufacturer to produce his exploitative portrait of capitalism.[1] The book's full title was an "ironically inverted parody" of Dühring's praise for the American economistHenry Charles Carey, whom Marx had also criticized.[5] Dühring's growing popularity prompted Liebknecht to urge Engels to respond.[1] Engels was initially hesitant, concerned about attacking a blind man, but was persuaded by what he saw as "the chap's colossal arrogance".[1]
Engels and Marx viewed Dühring's theories as a form of "petty-bourgeois socialism" that threatened the theoretical foundations of theirproletarian movement.[6] Engels was also concerned with a broader intellectual trend of "shallow materialist popularisation" in the philosophy of science that had followed the publication ofCharles Darwin's work, in which writers likeKarl Vogt andLudwig Büchner promoted "scientific systems" to validate their schemes for social reform.[6] Influenced by the scientific enthusiasm of his day, Engels saw the polemic as an opportunity not only to refute Dühring but also to counter what he considered his outdatedmechanistic materialism with a new,dialectical materialism.[7][8] He interrupted his long-term work on the manuscript ofDialectics of Nature to focus on the polemic, which he considered a tedious but necessary "ideological knockabout".[9][10]
Anti-Dühring was Engels's major attempt to codify and popularise theMarxist worldview. It presented a comprehensive account of their philosophy, moving beyond a narrow critique of Dühring to offer a "pacey, engaging and comprehensible explanation of the science of Marxism".[11] The work is divided into three sections, reflecting its broad scope.
In the first section, Engels explains the foundations ofdialectical materialism. He contrasts the "metaphysical" mode of thought, characterized by fixed and isolated categories, with the "dialectical" method, which he traces to ancient Greek philosophers and especially toGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For Engels, dialectics "comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin, and ending".[12] He argued that the laws of dialectics, which Hegel had applied to ideas, were also applicable to the natural sciences and the material world, stating that "the dialectics of the mind is only the reflection of the forms of motion of the real world, both of nature and of history."[6][13] Drawing on his research forDialectics of Nature, Engels outlined three fundamental laws of dialectics:[14][15]
He argued that these laws, which described a process of development through contradiction, could explain the evolution of not just history and society, but also biology, chemistry, and physics.[16] Engels also anticipated the "twilight of philosophy", arguing that as the sciences developed their own general laws, philosophy would be rendered obsolete; all that would remain of "all former philosophy" is "the science of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics."[17]
The second part of the book provides an overview of Marx's critique ofpolitical economy, as detailed inDas Kapital. Engels explains the theory ofsurplus value and how it arises from theexploitation of labour in a capitalist system. He argues that thecapitalist mode of production is defined by a fundamental contradiction between the socialised nature of production and the private appropriation of its products.[18] Engels presents the materialist conception of history, which he defines as the view that "'all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history ofclass struggles'", with these classes being "the product of the relations of production and exchange", i.e. the economic relations of their time.[19] Political and legal structures, as well as prevailing ideas, are ultimately determined by thiseconomic base of society.[19]
In the final section, Engels outlines the history and theory ofscientific socialism. He distinguishes the Marxist approach from that of theutopian socialists likeHenri de Saint-Simon,Charles Fourier, andRobert Owen. While acknowledging their important critiques of capitalist society, Engels argues that their visions were merely "pure phantasies" because they were not grounded in a scientific understanding of historical development and class struggle.[20] Engels's concept of scientific socialism was based on what he called Marx's two great discoveries: the materialist conception of history and the theory of surplus value.[21]
Engels argues that scientific socialism, by contrast, is based on a materialist analysis of history. The contradictions inherent in capitalism will inevitably lead to a social revolution in which theproletariat seizes political power. This act, he claims, resolves the contradiction at the heart of capitalism by transforming the means of production into public property. Engels famously describes the subsequent trajectory: "The state is not 'abolished'.It withers away."[20][22] This process marks "the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom".[20][22]
Anti-Dühring was first serialised inVorwärts between 1877 and 1878, and published as a book inLeipzig in 1878.[23] The work was a "credible critique" that successfully marginalized Dühring's influence within the German social-democratic movement and "put [Engels's] name before a substantial public."[5] It became a "Marxist handbook" that codified the ideas ofdialectical materialism andscientific socialism.[24] For many socialists, it provided the primary text through which a younger generation in Germany and across Europe came to understand Marxism.[25] Figures such asAugust Bebel,Georgi Plekhanov,Eduard Bernstein, andKarl Kautsky were all heavily influenced by the book. According to the later Soviet scholarDavid Riazanov, the book was "epoch-making in the history of Marxism", as the younger generation learned from it "what was scientific socialism, what were its philosophic premises, what was its method".[25][26] Kautsky recalled that "it was only throughAnti-Dühring that we learnt to understandCapital and read it properly".[25][26]
At the request ofPaul Lafargue, Engels adapted a section of the book into a separate, more accessible pamphlet, which was published in 1880 asSocialism: Utopian and Scientific. This version became Engels's bestseller and had a "tremendous impression" in France and beyond, serving as a popular primer for scientific socialism.[27] According toTerrell Carver, the pamphlet was "theCommunist Manifesto of its time, but arguably ... even more influential," calling it "the work from which millions of conversions to Marxism were made".[28]
The influence ofAnti-Dühring in codifying and popularising Marxism was immense. In the 20th century, its legacy became a subject of controversy. Beginning withGeorg Lukács, and followed by otherWestern Marxists such asStanisław Brzozowski andJean-Paul Sartre, some critics argued thatAnti-Dühring represented an "Engelsian inversion" of Marx's philosophy.[29][26][30] Critics claimed that Engels had created a rigid,scientistic dogma by extending Marx's dialectical method to the natural world, a move they argued was absent in Marx's own writings.[31] The philosopherLeszek Kołakowski identified four key points of divergence between Marx and Engels that originated inAnti-Dühring: the replacement of Marx'santhropocentrism with naturalisticevolutionism; the shift from Marx'sepistemology ofpraxis to a technical interpretation of knowledge; the idea of philosophy being superseded by science rather than merging with life as a whole; and the focus on infinite progression over revolutionaryeschatology.[32]
The American scholar Norman Levine argued that Engels was the "first revisionist" of Marx and that this "Engelsism" laid the foundation for the later dogmatism ofSoviet Marxism.[33][31] In his bookThe Tragic Deception: Marx Contra Engels (1975), Levine presented what he called Marx's "dialectical naturalism"—centered on human praxis and anthropology—as being in direct opposition to "Engelsism," which he characterized as a form of "mechanistic materialism" and "social positivism."[34] Levine argued that Engels'sAnti-Dühring is central to this distortion; itsdeterministic andpositivist approach, its focus on technology as the primary driver of history, and its application of supposed dialectical laws to nature created a rigid dogma that erased thehumanistic andanthropological core of Marx's philosophy.[35] This interpretation suggests that Engels's scientism was directly responsible for theideology of the Soviet Union.[33]Joseph Stalin's chapter on "Dialectical and Historical Materialism" in theShort Course (1938) drew heavily on Engels's formulations fromAnti-Dühring andDialectics of Nature to create a totalising and "indisputable" state philosophy.[36]
However, biographers of Engels dispute the idea that he knowingly corrupted Marx's thought.Tristram Hunt points out that Marx was the "prime mover" behind the book, had the entire manuscript read to him before publication, contributed a small section on economics, and recommended it as an important text for understanding German socialism. According to Hunt, both Marx and Engels had been energized by the scientific progress of the day, andAnti-Dühring represented an "expression of authentic, mature Marxist opinion".[31]Terrell Carver notes that Marx's own interest in science and his view of the dialectical law applying to both nature and society mean thatAnti-Dühring's grand theoretical system was an authentic expression of their joint outlook.[37] S. H. Rigby argues that the supposed distinctions between the two thinkers are often overstated, noting that Marx's own writings contain "vulgar materialist and positivist claims" similar to those for which Engels is criticised.[38] Rigby concludes that the attempt to make Engels a "scapegoat for the views which Marx himself quite explicitly formulated" is unconvincing.[39]
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