Modern socialism, although it arose essentially from the recogni- 
tion of the class antagonisms existing in the society found at hand 
between proprietors and non-proprietors, workers and exploiters, 
appears, however, in its theoretical form at first as a more 
logical and further extension of the principles laid down by the 
great French philosophers of the eighteenth century, socialism’s first 
representatives, Morelly and Mably, having also belonged among 
them. Like every new theory, modern socialism had, at first, to 
connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade, ready to its hand, 
however deeply its roots lay in material facts. 

The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the 
coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. None of 
the existing authorities had validity for them. Everything, including 
religion, natural science, political institutions, and society, was 
subjected to the most unsparing criticism. Everything must justify 1 its 
existence before the supreme court of reason, or give up existence. 
Reason was put forward as the sole measure. It was the time when, as 
Hegel says, the world stood upon its head; first in the sense that 
man’s head and the principles arrived at by means of thought wished 
to be recognised as the basis of all human views, action and 
association, and then later, in the sense that, as reality was found to 
contradict these principles completely, things were, in fact, turned 
upside down. Every form of society and government then existing, 
every old traditional view was denounced as being irrational and was 
thrown out; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led by absurd 
prejudices; now, for the first time, the light of day dawned, reason 
reigned and the whole past deserved only pity and contempt. 

We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more 
than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie, that this eternal Right 


592 From the Preparatory Materials 


then proclaimed found its corresponding realisation in bourgeois 
justice; that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of 
Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a 
democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the eighteenth 
century could, no more than those of former ages, go beyond the 
limits imposed upon them by their epoch. 

But, side by side with the antagonism between the nobility, 
monarchy and the burghers, was the general antagonism of 
exploiters and exploited, of poor workers and rich idlers, and it was 
precisely this circumstance that made it possible for the representa- 
tives of the bourgeoisie to put themselves forward as representing 
suffering humanity; there also existed, though as yet undeveloped 
and not in the foreground, the contradiction between workers and 
capitalists. This prompted individual minds to go further in their 
criticism, to demand equality not only of political rights, but also of 
social standing, and to demand the abolition of class differences. 
Both directions were interwoven with Saint-Simon; the latter 
predominated with the French ascetic communists; while Owen 
systematically, in the country with the most developed capitalist 
production and the contradictions created by it, developed it in 
direct relation to French materialism. 

Right from its beginnings, bourgeois development possessed this 
inherent contradiction. Thomas Münzer, the Levellers.?!> Thomas 
More’s Utopia, and so on. 

The new transformation of society was again supposed to be based 
on the eternal laws of reason and justice, but these are as different 
from those of the bourgeois French philosophers as heaven from 
hell. A world constructed by these philosophers and according to 
their principles is quite as irrational and unjust, so it was disposed of 
just as readily as all the earlier forms of society and government. And 
if pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this 
has been the result of the as yet incorrect understanding of them. 
What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now 
arisen and understands the truth; the fact that he has arisen is not an 
inevitable event, a necessary link in the chain of human 
development, but a mere happy incident. He might just as well have 
been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 
500 years of suffering and error. 

This mode of outlook is essentially that of all English, French and 
of the first German socialists, including Weitling. Socialism is the 
expression of absolute truth, reason and justice and has only to be 
discovered to conquer all the world; but when precisely it is 
discovered is a matter of pure chance. And in this process absolute 


From Engels’ Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dtihring 593 


reason, truth, and justice are different with the founder of each in- 
dividual school—compare Owen, Fourier, the Saint-Simonists, Louis 
Blanc, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux, and Weitling; and since the crite- 
rion of truth and justice for each of them is his own subjec- 
tive understanding, the subjective measure of his knowledge and 
his intellectual training, the only possible outcome is that they 
mutually erode one another. To make science of socialism, it had to 
be placed upon a real basis and be provided with firm, unshakable 
foundation. And this was done by Marx. 

Meanwhile, alongside and after French eighteenth-century phi- 
losophy, the new German philosophy which culminated in Hegel 
had arisen. Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as 
the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all 
born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the Hegel of the Ancient 
World, had already analysed the most essential forms of dialectic 
thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although 
it also had brilliant exponents of the dialectic (Descartes and Spino- 
za, for example), was, especially through English influence, beco- 
me rigidly fixed in the metaphysical mode of reasoning, which 
also dominated the French of the eighteenth century. Metaphysi- 
cal reasoning considers things and their mental reflexes, ideas, as 
isolated, one after the other and apart from each other, as objects 
of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. A thing either 
is or is not; a thing cannot be, at one and the same time, both 
itself, and something else. This mode of thought, luminous 
at first sight, was the metaphysical one. Dialectics, on the other 
hand, is not satisfied with this; it interprets things and concepts in 
their interdependence, in their interrelations, in their interaction 
and their consequent changes, in their emergence, development and 
demise. Since things do not, however, exist on their own in the 
world, but affect and influence one another, change, appear and 
disappear, it is easy to understand that metaphysical thought, 
although correct in certain very broad, but, at the same time, 
restricted areas, the scale of which is determined by the nature of the 
given circumstances, sooner or later reaches, in every area, a limit 
beyond which it becomes one-sided, limited, abstract, and falls into 
irresolvable contradictions, out of which only dialectics can help it. 
For everyday purposes, we know, e.g., whether an animal is alive or 
not; closer inquiry cannot establish absolutely when it began to exist. 
The jurists know this; they have vainly tried to determine a limit 
beyond which the killing of a human embryo is murder (and it is just 
as impossible to determine absolutely the moment of physiological 
death, which is a protracted process with many stages, as can be read 


594 From the Preparatory Materials 


in any physiology textbook). In the same way, every organic being is 
every moment the same and not the same; every moment some cells 
die and others are built anew, so the individual is always the same 
and, at the same time, something else. An exact representation of the 
universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of its 
reflection in the human mind, can therefore only be obtained 
through a dialectical approach, with constant regard to the 
innumerable actions and reactions of the life and death, of 
progressive or retrogressive changes. And this is how the new 
German philosophy has worked. Kant turned Newton’s stable solar 
system and its eternal duration, once it had been given the initial 
impulse, into the result of a historic process of the formation of the 
sun and all the planets out of an original nebulous mass, a hypothesis 
that was mathematically substantiated in all its details fifty years later 
by Laplace and is now accepted by all natural scientists. Hegel 
completed this philosophy, by creating a system in which the whole 
world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e. 
aS in constant motion, change, transformation, development. From 
this viewpoint the history of mankind no longer appeared as a 
chaotic jumble of senseless acts of violence, all equally standing 
condemned before the philosophers’ now mature reason, and which 
are best forgotten as quickly as possible—in comparison with the 
light of eternal truth that had now dawned—but as the process of 
evolution of man himself. It was now the task of philosophy to reveal 
the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to 
follow the inner law running through all its apparently accidental 
phenomena. 

Whether or not Hegel solved this problem is immaterial here. His 
merit was that he propounded it. He could not possibly have — 
solved it, however, since he was an idealist, i.e., for him thoughts 
were not pictures of things, but, conversely, things and their 
evolution were only the realised pictures of the “Idea”, existing 
somewhere from eternity before the world was. And this, together 
with the subjective limitations of its creator, is what destroyed the 
Hegelian system. 

The Hegelian system was the last and most consummate form of 
philosophy, in so far as the latter is represented as a special 
science superior to every other. All philosophy collapsed with this 
system. But there has remained the dialectic method of thinking 
and the conception that the natural, historical and intellectual 
world moves and transforms itself endlessly in a constant process 
of becoming and passing away. Not only philosophy but all 
sciences were now required to discover the laws of motion of this 


From Engels’ Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring 595 


constant process of transformation, each in its particular domain. 
And this was the legacy which Hegelian philosophy bequeathed to 
its successors. 

Meanwhile, the development of capitalist production had 
advanced with giant strides, especially in its first homeland— 
England. The antagonism between the bourgeois and the pro- 
letarians was becoming more and more acute; in 1842 the Chartist 
movement reached its peak, and facts more and more strenuously 
gave the lie to the teachings of bourgeois economy. In France, the 
Lyons insurrection of had likewise proclaimed the struggle 
of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The English and French 
socialist theories acquired historic importance and were bound to 
have their repercussions and criticism in Germany as well, 
although industry there was only just beginning to climb out of 
the stage of small-scale production. The theoretical socialism that 
now took shape, rather among Germans than in Germany, had 
therefore to import all its material in fact to [...]*