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Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (German:Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie) is a book published byFriedrich Engels in 1886.
According to Engels, the seed for this book was planted 40 years before, inThe German Ideology written byKarl Marx and Engels, but unpublished in their lifetimes. The undertaking is performed to deal critically with German philosophy from adialectical materialist position. Here Engels emphasized the importance ofGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel andLudwig Feuerbach for their own theories.
Hegel's idealist, conservative system must be distinguished from his materialist, revolutionary method ofdialectics. Feuerbach had turned to law against Hegel's idealistic system and "the fundamental question of philosophy": the relation of thinking and being. But Feuerbach rejectedHegel's dialectical method, which is why his view of man and nature remainedabstract and unhistorical. Marx only kept the "rational" content from the dialectical method and freed it from their idealistic form.
The book was only about 50 pages long, and was written early in 1886, and published that year inDie Neue Zeit, issues No. 4 and 5. In 1888 a revised print byJohann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz was published inStuttgart, which contained some additional commentary by Engels. In this edition, Marx' 1845Theses on Feuerbach was also reprinted for the first time. The first English translation by Austin Lewis was published in the United States in 1903 by Charles H. Kerr & Company.