The following work originated from three chapters of my book: *Herrn E. Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft*, Leipzig 1878. I put them together for my friend Paul Lafargue for translation into French, and added a few further elaborations. The French translation, which I revised, appeared first in the *Revue socialiste* and then independently under the title: *Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique*, Paris 1880. A rendering into Polish made from the French translation has just appeared in Geneva and bears the title: *Socyjalizm utopijny a naukowy*. Imprimerie de l'Aurore, Genève 1882.

The surprising success of Lafargue’s translation in the countries of the French tongue, and notably in France itself, could not but force the question upon me whether a separate German edition of these three chapters might likewise be of use. At that point the editors of the Zurich *Sozialdemokrat* informed me that within the German Social-Democratic Party a general demand was being raised for the publication of new propaganda brochures, and asked me whether I would not designate those three chapters for the purpose. I naturally agreed and made my work available.

But originally it had not been written for immediate popular propaganda at all. How could a work that was initially purely scientific lend itself to that? What changes in form and content were necessary?

As far as form is concerned, only the many foreign words could give cause for misgivings. But already Lassalle was by no means sparing with foreign words in his speeches and propaganda writings, and, to my knowledge, no one has complained about it. Since that time, our workers have read newspapers far more, and far more regularly, and have thereby become more familiar with foreign words to the same degree. I have restricted myself to

removing all unnecessary foreign words. With the unavoidable ones, I have dispensed with the addition of so-called explanatory translations. The unavoidable foreign words, generally accepted scientific-technical terms for the most part, would precisely not be unavoidable if they were translatable. Translation thus falsifies the sense; instead of explaining, it confuses. Oral information is far more helpful here.

In content, on the other hand, I believe I can assert, will present German workers with few difficulties. Only the third section is difficult at all, but far less so for the workers, whose general conditions of life it summarises, than for the “educated” bourgeois. In the numerous explanatory additions that I have made here, I have in fact thought less of the workers than of “educated” readers; people such as, for instance, Herr Deputy von Eynern, Herr Privy Councillor Heinrich von Sybel and other Treitschkes, possessed by the irresistible urge to give the benefit of their ghastly ignorance and, arising from that, their comprehensibly colossal misunderstanding of socialism, always anew in black and white. If Don Quixote tilts his lance at windmills, that is in his office and in his role; but we cannot possibly allow Sancho Panza such a thing.

Such readers will also be astonished, in a sketched history of the development of socialism, to come across the Kant-Laplace cosmogony, modern natural science and Darwin, classical German philosophy and Hegel. But scientific socialism is, as it happens, an essentially German product and could only arise among the nation whose classical philosophy had kept alive the tradition of conscious dialectics: in Germany
(1)
. 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 the dialectics borne by them in the swamp of a barren eclecticism, so much so that we are compelled to call upon modern natural science as a witness for the corroboration of dialectics in reality—we German socialists are proud that we descend not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte and Hegel.

London, 21 September 1882

Friedrich Engels

Footnotes by Friedrich Engels

(1)
“In Germany” is a slip of the pen. It should read: “among Germans”. For just as German dialectics was on the one hand indispensable in the genesis of scientific socialism, so too were the developed economic and political conditions of England and France indispensable. The backward stage of economic and political development in Germany, at the beginning of the forties still far more so than today, could at most produce socialist caricatures (cf. *Commun. Manifesto*, III, l.c:
“The German, or ‘True’ Socialism”
). Only when the economic and political conditions produced in England and France were subjected to German-dialectical criticism, only then could a real result be attained. From this side, therefore, scientific socialism is no exclusively German, but just as much an international, product. [This footnote was inserted by Engels in the third German edition of 1883.]