Title page of the English edition 
of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 281 

And Dr. Dihring, in this respect, was quite up to the national 
mark. Nothing less than a complete System of Philosophy, mental, 
moral, natural, and historical; a complete System of Political 
Economy and Socialism; and, finally, a Critical History of Political 
Economy*—three big volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and 
intrinsically, three army corps of arguments mobilised against all 
previous philosophers and economists in general, and against 
Marx in particular—in fact, an attempt at a complete “revolution 
in science” —these were what I should have to tackle. I had to 
treat of all and every possible subject, from the concepts of time 
and space to Bimetallism*'; from the eternity of matter and 
motion to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin’s 
natural selection to the education of youth in a future society. 
Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave 
me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a 
more connected form than had previously been done, the views 
held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects. And 
that was the principal reason which made me undertake this 
otherwise ungrateful task. 

My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig 
Vorwarts, the chief organ of the socialist party, and later on as a 
book: Herrn Eugen Dihring’s Umwalzung der Wissenschaft 
(Mr. E. Dühring’s Revolution in Science), a second edition of which 
appeared in Zurich, 1886. 

At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative 
of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three 
chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and 
published in 1880, under the title: Socialisme utopique et socialisme 
scientifique”? From this French text Polish and Spanish editions 
were prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the 
pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, 
and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have. 
since been published. Thus, with the present English edition, this 
little book circulates in ten languages. I am not aware that any 
other socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848 or 
Marx’s Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany it has 
had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all. 

The Appendix, “The Mark”, was written with the intention of 
spreading among the German Socialist Party some elementary 

a This refers to E. Dihring’s books: Cursus der Philosophie als streng wis- 
senschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung; Cursus der National- und 
Socialékonomie einschliesslich der Hauptpunkte der Finanzpolitik; Kritische Geschichte der 
Nationalékonomie und der Socialismus.— Ed. 

knowledge of the history and development of landed property in 
Germany. This seemed all the more necessary at a time when the 
assimilation by that party of the working people of the towns was 
in a fair way of completion, and when the agricultural labourers 
and peasants had to be taken in hand. This appendix has been 
included in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land 
common to all Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are 
even less known in England than in Germany. I have left the text 
as it stands in the original, without alluding to the hypothesis 
recently started by Maxim Kovalevsky, according to which the 
partition of the arable and meadow lands among the members of 
the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for joint-account 
by a large patriarchal family community embracing several 
generations (as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian 
Zadruga), and that the partition, later on, took place when the 
community had increased, so as to become too unwieldy for 
joint-account management.* Kovalevsky is probably quite right, but 
the matter is still sub judice. 

The economic terms used in this work, as far as they are new, 
agree with those used in the English edition of Marx’s Capital.”” 
We call “production of commodities” that economic phase where 
articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but 
also for purposes of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use 
values. This phase extends from the first beginnings of production 
for exchange down to our present time; it attains its full 
development under capitalist production only, that is, under 
conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the means of 
production, employs, for wages, labourers, people deprived of all 
means of production except their own labour-power, and pockets 
the excess of the selling price of the products over his outlay. We 
divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages 
into three periods: (1) handicraft, small master craftsmen with a 
few journeymen and apprentices, where each labourer produces 
the complete article; (2) manufacture, where greater numbers of 
workmen, grouped in one large establishment, produce the 
complete article on the principle of division of labour, each 
workman performing only one partial operation, so that the 
product is complete only after having passed successively through 
the hands of all; (3) modern industry, where the product is 
produced by machinery driven by power, and where the work of 

a Engels refers to M. M. Kovalevsky’s works: Tableau des origines et de l’évolution 
de la famille et de la propriété and Ilepeo6umnoe npaeo, 1, «Pozb».— Ed. 
b Under consideration.— Ed. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 283 

the labourer is limited to superintending and correcting the 
performances of the mechanical agent.* 

I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet 
with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. 
But if we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the 
prejudices of British “respectability”;” we should be even worse off 
than we are. This book defends what we call “historical 
materialism”, and the word materialism grates upon the ears of 
the immense majority of British readers. “Agnosticism” might be 
tolerated, but materialism is utterly inadmissible. 

And yet the original home of all modern materialism, from the 
seventeenth century onwards, is England.‘ 

‘Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already 
the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, ‘whether it was 
impossible for matter to think?’ 

“In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God’s 
omnipotence, 1.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, 
he was a nominalist.2°* Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is 
chiefly found among the English schoolmen. 

“The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him 
natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based 
upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural 
philosophy. Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae,””’ Democritus and 
his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities. According to him the 
senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is 
based on experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished 
by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, 
analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal 
forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in 
matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of 
mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of 
an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension—or a ‘qual’, to use a term of 
Jakob Béhme’s *—of matter.* 

“In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within itself 

* “Qual” is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally means torture, a 
ain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time the mystic BGhme puts 
P 4g Pp 

* The beginning of the Introduction up to the words “the mechanical agent” is 
omitted in Die Neue Zeit.— Ed. 

b In Die Neue Zeit there follows: “i.e. British philistines”.— Ed. 

¢ Further on Engels quotes a lengthy passage from The Holy Family (see present 
edition, Vol. 4, pp. 127-29). Substantial differences between the text in Die Neue Zeit 
and Engels’ translation into English are given in footnotes.— Ed. 

d In Die Neue Zeit there follows the sentence omitted in the English edition: ““The 

the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter, 
surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamour, seems to attract man’s 
whole entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically 
formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from 
theology. 

“In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. 
Hobbes is the man who systematises Baconian materialism. 
Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes 
into the abstract experience of the mathematician’; geometry is 
proclaimed as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to 
misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, 
fleshless spiritualism, and that on the latter’s own ground, 
materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, 
from a sensual, it passes into an intellectual entity; but thus, too, it 
evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteris- 
tic of the intellect. 

“Hobbes, as Bacon’s continuator, argues thus: if all human 
knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas 
are but the phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real 
world. Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. One 
name may be applied to more than one of them. There may even 
be names of names. It would imply a contradiction if, on the one 
hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of 
sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; 
that besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which 
are one and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, 
not individual, nature. An unbodily substance is the same 
absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance, are but 
different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate 
thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all 
changes going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, 
unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless 

into the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas; his “qual” 
was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its turn, the 
spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person subject to it, in 
contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without.? 

primary forms of matter are the living, individualising forces of being inherent in it 
and producing the distinctions between the species.” — Ed. 

4 In Die Neue Zeit this note was omitted by Engels.— Ed. 

b Die Neue Zeit continues with the following: “Physical motion is sacrificed to 
mechanical or mathematical motion.”— Ed. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 285 

process of addition. Only material things being perceptible to us, 
we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own 
existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical 
movement which has a beginning and an end. The objects of 
impulse are what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as 
nature. Power and freedom are identical. 

‘“‘Hobbes had systematised Bacon without, however, furnishing a 
proof for Bacon’s fundamental principle, the origin of all human 
knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his 
Essay on the Human Understanding, supplied this proof.’ 

“Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian 
materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley similarly 
shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke’s 
sensationalism. At all events, for practical materialists, Theism?”° is 
but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion.” * 

Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern 
materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the 
compliment he paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the 
less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of 
that brilliant school of French materialists which made _ the 
eighteenth century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won over 
Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French 
century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of 
which we outsiders, in England as well as in Germany, are still trying 
to acclimatise. 

There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what 
struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in 
England, was, what he was then bound to consider the religious 
bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle class. We, 
at that time, were all materialists, or, at least, very advanced 
freethinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable that almost all 
educated people in England should believe in all sorts of 
impossible miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and 
Mantell should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash 
too much with the myths of the book of Genesis; while, in order to 
find people who dared to use their own intellectual faculties with 
regard to religious matters, you had to go amongst the unedu- 
cated, the “great unwashed”, as they were then called, the 
working people, especially the Owenite Socialists. 

* Marx and Engels, Die heilige Familie, Frankfurt a. M., 1845, pp. 201-04. 

a J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.— Ed. 

But England has been “civilised” since then. The exhibition of 
18517°’ sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. 
England became gradually internationalised—in diet, in manners, 
in ideas; so much so that I begin to wish that some English 
manners and customs had made as much headway on the 
Continent as other continental habits have made here. Anyhow, 
the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only 
to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of 
continental scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to this, 
that agnosticism, though not yet considered “the thing” quite as 
much as the Church of England, is yet very nearly on a par, as far 
as respectability goes, with Baptism, and decidedly ranks above the 
Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that under these 
circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret 
and condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these 
“new-fangled notions” are not of foreign origin, are not “made in 
Germany”, like so many other articles of daily use, but are 
undoubtedly Old English, and that their British originators two 
hundred years ago went a good deal further than their 
descendants now dare to venture. 

What, indeed, is agnosticism, but, to use an expressive Lanca- 
shire term,’ “shamefaced” materialism? The agnostic’s conception 
of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is 
governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of 
action from without. But, he adds, we have no means either of 
ascertaining or of disproving the. existence of some Supreme 
Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good at 
the time when Laplace, to Napoleon’s question, why in the great 
astronomer’s Mécanique céleste? the Creator was not even men- 
tioned, proudly replied: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothése.” ° 
But nowadays, in our evolutionary conception of the universe, 
there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to 
talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world, 
implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me, a 
gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people. 

Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon 
the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how 
do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the 

2 In Die Neue Zeit the phrase “to use an expressive Lancashire term” is 
omitted.— Ed. 

5 This refers to P. S. Laplace, Traité de mécanique céleste.— Ed. 

¢ “T had no need of this hypothesis.”— Ed. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 287 

objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us 
that, whenever he speaks of objects or their qualities, he does in 
reality not mean these objects and qualities, of which he cannot 
know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they 
have produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems 
undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before 
there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die 
That2 And human action had solved the difficulty long before 
human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the 
eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, 
according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an 
infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense- 
perceptions. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our 
estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be 
wrong, and our attempt must fail. But if we succeed in 
accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with 
our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, 
then that is positive proof that our perceptions of it and of its 
qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves. And whenever 
we find ourselves face to face with a failure, then we generally are 
not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that 
the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and 
superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a 
way not warranted by them—what we call defective reasoning.” So 
long as we take care to train and to use our senses properly, and 
to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions 
properly made and properly used, so long we shall find that the 
result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with 
the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single 
instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our 
sense-perceptions, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds 
ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at 
variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility 
between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it. 

But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may 
correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any 
sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This “thing-in- 
itself”’ is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If 

a “In the beginning was the deed” (see Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 3, “Faust’s 
Study”).— Ed. 

b In Die Neue Zeit the words “what we call defective reasoning” are 
omitted.— Ed. 

you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; 
nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us; 
and when your senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped 
the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant’s celebrated unknow- 
able Ding an sich. To which it may be added that in Kant’s time our 
knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he 
might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, 
a mysterious “thing-in-itself”’. But one after another these 
ungraspable things have been grasped, analysed and, what is 
more, reproduced by the giant progress of science; and what we can 
produce, we certainly cannot consider as unknowable. To the 
chemistry of the first half of this century organic substances were 
such mysterious objects; now we learn to build them up one after 
another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic 
processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical 
constitution of no matter what body is known, it can be built up 
from its elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution 
of the highest organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but 
there is no reason why we should not, if only after centuries, 
arrive at that knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial 
albumen. But if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have 
produced organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms, 
is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies. 

As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental 
reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom 
is. He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it 
is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but 
that we have no proof of their not having been created at some 
time or other. But if you try to use this admission against him in 
any particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he 
admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have none 
of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you 
there is no Creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are 
concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor 
annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the 
brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by 
immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific 
man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his 
science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his 
ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism. 

At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic, it 
is evident that I could not describe the conception of history 
sketched out in this little book as “historical agnosticism”’. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 289 

Religious people would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly 
ask, was I going to make fun of them? And thus I hope even 
British respectability* will not be overshocked if I use, in English 
as well as in so many other languages, the term “historical 
materialism”, to designate that view of the course of history which 
seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all 
important historic events in the economic development of society, 
in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the 
consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the 
struggles of these classes against one another. 

This indulgence will perhaps be accorded to me all the sooner if 
I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to 
British respectability.” I have mentioned the fact that about forty 
or fifty years ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was 
struck by what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry 
and stupidity of the English respectable middle class. I am now 
going to prove that the respectable English middle class of that 
time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the intelligent 
foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained. 

When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle 
class‘ of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had 
conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisa- 
tion, but this position, also, had become too narrow for its 
expansive power. The development of the middle class, the 
bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the 
feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall. 

But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman 
Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalised Western 
Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand _ political 
system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the 
Mohammedan countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with 
the halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own hierarchy 
on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most 
powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, full one-third of the soil 
of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be 

a In Die Neue Zeit there follow the words: “which in German is called 
philistinism”.— Ed. 

b In Die Neue Zeit the words “the respectability of the British philistine” are 
substituted for “British respectability” .— Ed. 

¢ From here on and up to the paragraph beginning with the words “The new 
starting-point” (p. 292 of this volume), Engels’ terms “middle class” and 
“bourgeoisie” are translated as ‘“Burgerthum” in Die Neue Zeit.—Ed. 

d In Die Neue Zeit: “The free development” .— Ed. 

successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred 
central organisation, had to be destroyed. 

Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle class went on the 
great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, 
physiology, were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the 
development of its industrial production, required a science which 
ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the 
modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science 
had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been 
allowed to overstep the limits set by faith, and for that reason had 
been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the 
bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to 
join in the rebellion. 

The above, though touching but two of the points where the 
rising middle class was bound to come into collision with the 
established religion, will be sufficient to show, first, that the class 
most directly interested in the struggle against the pretensions of 
the Roman Church was the bourgeoisie; and second, that every 
struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious 
disguise, had to be directed against the Church in the first — 
instance. But if the universities and the traders of the cities started 
the cry, it was sure to find, and did find, a strong echo in the 
masses of the country people, the peasants, who everywhere had 
to struggle for their very existence with their feudal lords, spiritual 
and temporal. 

The long? fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated 
in three great, decisive battles. 

The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in 
Germany. The war-cry raised against the Church by Luther was 
responded to by two insurrections of a political nature: first, that 
of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the 
great Peasants’ War, 1525.7 Both were defeated, chiefly in 
consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the 
burghers of the towns—an indecision into the causes of which we 
cannot here enter. From that moment the struggle degenerated 
into a fight between the local princes and the central power,” and 
ended by blotting out Germany, for two hundred years, from the 
politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation 
produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute 

4 Instead of “long” Die Neue Zeit has “great”.— Ed. 

5 Instead of “central power” Die Neue Zeit has “imperial central power”.— 
Ed. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 291 

monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-East Germany 
converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced 
to serfs. 

But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was 
one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His 
predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact 
that in the commercial world of competition success or failure 
does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon 
circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth 
or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior 
economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of 
economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres 
were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened 
to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of 
faith—the value of gold and silver—began to totter and to break 
down. Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and 
republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, 
could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, 
bishops and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing 
tool in the hands of princes,* Calvinism founded a republic in 
Holland, and active republican pares in England, and, above all, 
Scotland. 

In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its 
doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in 
England. The middle class of the towns brought it on, and the 
yeomanry° of the country districts fought it out. Curiously 
enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings,“ the peasantry 
furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry 
is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined 
by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years 
after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. 
Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and for the plebeian 
element in the towns,* the bourgeoisie alone would never have 
fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have 
brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to secure even those 

a Die Neue Zeit has “petty princes” instead of “princes” .— Ed. 

b Die Neue Zeit has “the middle peasantry (yeomanry)” instead of 
“yeomanry”’.— Ed. 

c Die Neue Zeit has “bourgeois revolutions” instead of “bourgeois rising” .— 
Ed. 

d In Die Neue Zeit the rest of the sentence reads as follows: “the matter 
would have never been fought out to the bitter end and Charles I brought to the 
scaffold.” — Ed. 

conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the 
time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further— 
exactly as in 1793 in France and in 1848 in Germany. This seems, 
in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society. 

Well, upon this excess of revolutionary activity there necessarily 
followed the inevitable reaction which in its turn went beyond the 
point where it might have maintained itself.* After a series of 
oscillations, the new centre of gravity was at last attained and 
became a new starting-point. The grand period of English history, 
known to respectability” under the name of “the Great Rebellion”, 
and the struggles succeeding it, were brought to a close by the 
comparatively puny event‘ entitled by Liberal historians, “the 
Glorious Revolution”.?*? 

The new starting-point was a compromise between the rising 
middle class“ and ex-feudal landowners. The latter, though called, 
as now, the aristocracy, had been long since on the way which led 
them to become what Louis Philippe in France became at a much 
later period, “the first bourgeois of the kingdom”. Fortunately for 
England, the old feudal barons had killed one another during the 
Wars of the Roses.*” Their successors, though mostly scions of the 
old families, had been so much out of the direct line of descent 
that they constituted quite a new body, with habits and tendencies 
far more bourgeois than feudal. They fully understood the value 
of money, and at once began to increase their rents by turning 
hundreds of small farmers out and replacing them by sheep. 
Henry VIII, while squandering the Church lands, created fresh 
bourgeois landlords by wholesale; the innumerable confiscations of 
estates, regranted to absolute or relative upstarts, and continued 
during the whole of the seventeenth century, had the same result. 
Consequently, ever since Henry VII, the English “aristocracy”, far 
from counteracting the development of industrial production, had, 
on the contrary, sought to indirectly profit thereby; and there had 
always been a section of the great landowners willing, from 
economical or political reasons, to co-operate with the leading men 
of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. The compromise of 
1689 was, therefore, easily accomplished. The political spoils of 

a Die Neue Zeit has “beyond its goal” instead of “beyond the point where it 
might have maintained itself” .— Ed. 

b Die Neue Zeit has “philistinism” instead of “respectability”. — Ed. 

© In Die Neue Zeit there follows “of 1689”.— Ed. 

d Here and below the term “middle class” is translated in Die Neue Zeit as 
“bourgeoisie” and as “middle class”, “middle estate”.— Ed. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 293 

a 

“pelf and place”* were left to the great landowning families, 
provided the economic interests of the financial, manufacturing, 
and commercial middle class were sufficiently attended to. And 
these economic interests were at that time powerful enough to 
determine the general policy of the nation. There might be 
squabbles about matters of detail, but, on the whole, the 
aristocratic oligarchy knew too well that its own economic 
prosperity was irretrievably bound up with that of the industrial 
and commercial middle class. 

From that time, the bourgeoisie was a humble, but still a 
recognised component of the ruling classes of England. With the 
rest of them, it had a common interest in keeping in subjection 
the great working mass of the nation. The merchant or 
manufacturer himself stood in the position of master, or, as it was 
until lately called, of ‘natural superior” to his clerks, his 
workpeople, his domestic servants. His interest was to get as much 
and as good work out of them as he could; for this end they had 
to be trained to proper submission. He was himself religious; his 
religion had supplied the standard under which he had fought the 
king and the lords; he was not long in discovering the 
opportunities this same religion offered him for working upon the 
minds of his natural inferiors, and making them submissive to the 
behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over them. In 
short, the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping 
down the “lower orders”, the great producing mass of the nation, 
and one of the means euIployed for that purpose was the 
influence of religion. 

There was another fact that contributed to strengthen the 
religious leanings of the bourgeoisie. That was the rise of 
materialism in England. This new” doctrine not only shocked the 
pious feelings of the middle class; it announced itself as a 
philosophy only fit for scholars and cultivated men of the world, 
in contrast to religion which was good enough for the uneducated 
masses, including the bourgeoisie. With Hobbes it stepped on the 
stage as a defender of royal prerogative and omnipotence; it called 
upon absolute monarchy to keep down that puer robustus sed 
malitiosus, to wit, the people. Similarly, with the successors of 
Hobbes, with Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, etc., the new deistic form 
of materialism remained an aristocratic, esoteric doctrine, and, 

a Die Neue Zeit has “posts, sinecure and high salary” instead of “‘pelf and 
place” .— Ed. 
b In Die Neue Zeit there follows the word “irreligious”.— Ed. 

therefore, hateful to the middle class both for its religious heresy 
and for its anti-bourgeois political connections. Accordingly, in 
opposition to the materialism and deism of the aristocracy, those 
Protestant sects whjch had furnished the flag and the fighting 
contingent against the Stuarts, continued to furnish the main 
strength of the progressive middle class, and form even today the 
backbone of “the Great Liberal Party”. 

In the meantime materialism passed from England to France, 
where it met and coalesced with another materialistic school of 
philosophers, a branch of Cartesianism.* In France, too, it 
remained at first an exclusively aristocratic doctrine. But soon its 
revolutionary character asserted itself. The French materialists did 
not limit their criticism to matters of religious belief; they 
extended it to whatever scientific tradition or political institution 
they met with; and to prove the claim of their doctrine to 
universal application, they took the shortest cut, and _ boldly 
applied it to all subjects of knowledge in the giant work after 
which they were named—the Encyclopédie. Thus, in one or the 
other of its two forms—-avowed materialism or deism—it became 
the creed of the whole cultured youth of France; so much so that, 
when the great Revolution broke out, the doctrine hatched by 
English Royalists gave a theoretical flag to French Republicans and 
Terrorists, and furnished the text for the Declaration of the 
Rights of Man.” 

The great French Revolution was the third uprising of the 
bourgeoisie, but the first that had entirely cast off the religious 
cloak, and was fought out on undisguised political lines; it was the 
first, too, that was really fought out up to the destruction of one 
of the combatants, the aristocracy, and the complete triumph of 
the other, the bourgeoisie. In England the continuity of pre- 
revolutionary and post-revolutionary institutions, and the com- 
promise between landlords and capitalists, found its expression in 
the continuity of judicial precedents and in the religious preserva- 
tion of the feudal forms of the law. In France the Revolution 
constituted a complete breach with the traditions of the past; it 
cleared out the very last vestiges of feudalism, and created in the 
Code Civil? a masterly adaptation of the old Roman law—that 
almost perfect expression of the juridical relations corresponding 
to the economic stage called by Marx the production of 
commodities—to modern capitalistic conditions; so masterly that 
this French revolutionary code still serves as a model for reforms 
of the law of property in all other countries, not excepting 
England. Let us, however, not forget that if English law continues 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 295 

to express the economic relations of capitalistic society in that 
barbarous feudal language which corresponds to the thing 
expressed, just as English spelling corresponds to English pronun- 
ciation — vous écrivez Londres et vous prononcez Constantinople, said a 
Frenchman—that same English law is the only one which has 
preserved through ages, and transmitted to America and the 
Colonies, the best part of that old Germanic personal freedom, 
local self-government and independence from all interference but 
that of the law courts, which on the Continent has been lost 
during the period of absolute monarchy, and has nowhere been as 
yet fully recovered. 

To return to our British bourgeois. The French Revolution gave 
him a splendid opportunity, with the help of the continental 
monarchies, to destroy French maritime commerce, to annex 
French colonies, and to crush the last French pretensions to 
maritime rivalry. That was one reason why he fought it. Another 
was that the ways of this revolution went very much against his 
grain. Not only its “execrable” terrorism, but the very attempt to 
carry bourgeois rule to extremes. What should the British 
bourgeois do without his aristocracy, that taught him manners, 
such as they were, and invented fashions for him—that furnished 
officers for the army, which kept order at home, and the navy, 
which conquered colonial possessions and new markets abroad? 
There was indeed a progressive minority of the bourgeoisie, that 
minority whose interests were not so well attended to under the 
compromise; this section, composed chiefly of the less wealthy 
middle class, did sympathise with the Revolution,” but it was 
powerless in Parliament. 

Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution, 
the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his 
religion. Had not the reign of terror in Paris proved what was the 
upshot, if the religious instincts of the masses were lost? The more 
materialism spread from France to neighbouring countries, and 
was reinforced by similar doctrinal currents, notably by German 
philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism and free thought 
generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of 
a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle class 
stuck to its manifold religious creeds. These creeds might differ 
from one another, but they were, all of them, distinctly religious, 
Christian creeds. 

@ “You write London, but pronounce Constantinople.” — Ed. 

21* 

While the Revolution ensured the political triumph of the 
bourgeoisie in France, in England Watt, Arkwright, Cartwright, 
and others initiated an industrial revolution, which completely 
shifted the centre of gravity of economic power. The wealth of the 
bourgeoisie increased considerably faster than that of the landed 
aristocracy. Within the bourgeoisie itself, the financial aristocracy, 
the bankers, etc., were more and more pushed into the 
background by the manufacturers. The compromise of 1689, even 
after the gradual changes it had undergone in favour of the 
bourgeoisie, no longer corresponded to the relative position of the 
parties to it. The character of these parties, too, had changed; the 
bourgeoisie of 1830 was very different from that of the preceding 
century. The political power still left to the aristocracy, and used 
by them to resist the pretensions of the new industrial bourgeoisie, 
became incompatible with the new economic interests. A fresh 
struggle with the aristocracy was necessary; it could end only in a 
victory of the new economic power. First, the Reform Act*” was 
pushed through, in spite of all resistance, under the impulse of 
the French Revolution of 1830. It gave to the bourgeoisie a 
recognised and powerful place in Parliament. Then the Repeal of 
the Corn Laws, which settled, once for all, the supremacy of the 
bourgeoisie, and especially of its most active portion, the 
manufacturers, over the landed aristocracy. This was the greatest 
victory of the bourgeoisie; it was, however, also the last it gained 
in its own exclusive interest. Whatever triumphs it obtained later 
on, it had to share with a new social power, first its ally, but soon 
its rival. 

The industrial revolution had created a class of large manufac- 
turing capitalists, but also a class—and a far more numerous 
one—of manufacturing workpeople. This class gradually in- 
creased in numbers, in proportion as the industrial revolution 
seized upon one branch of manufacture after another, and in the 
same proportion it increased in power. This power it proved as 
early as 1824, by forcing a reluctant Parliament to repeal the acts 
forbidding combinations of workmen.’ During the Reform 
agitation, the working men constituted the Radical wing of the 
Reform party; the Act of 1832 having excluded them from the 
suffrage, they formulated their demands in the People’s Charter,” 
and constituted themselves, in opposition to the great bourgeois 
Anti-Corn Law party,” into an independent party, the Chartists, 
the first working men’s party of modern times. | 

Then came the continental revolutions of February and March, 
1848, in which the working people played such a prominent part, 

\ 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 297 

and, at least in Paris, put forward demands which were certainly 
inadmissible from the point of view of capitalist society. And then 
came the general reaction. First the defeat of the Chartists on the 
10th April, 1848, then the crushing of the Paris working men’s 
insurrection in June of the same year, then the disasters of 1849 
in Italy, Hungary, South Germany, and at last the victory of Louis 
Bonaparte over Paris, 2nd December, 1851. For a time, at least, 
the bugbear of working-class pretensions was put down, but at 
what cost! If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of 
the necessity of maintaining the common people in a religious 
mood, how much more must he feel that necessity after all these 
experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his continental compeers, 
he continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after 
year, upon the evangelisation of the lower orders; not content with 
his own native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother 
Jonathan, the greatest organiser in existence of religion as a trade, 
and imported from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and 
the like”; and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the 
Salvation Army, which revives the propaganda of early Christiani- 
ty, appeals to the poor as the elect, fights capitalism in a religious 
way, and thus fosters an element of early Christian class 
antagonism, which one day may become troublesome to the 
well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it. 

It seems a law of historical development that the bourgeoisie can 
in no European country get hold of political power—at least for 
any length of time—in the same exclusive way in which the feudal 
aristocracy kept hold of it during the Middle Ages. Even in 
France, where feudalism was completely extinguished, the 
bourgeoisie, as a whole, has held full possession of the Govern- 
ment for very short periods only. During Louis Philippe’s reign, 
1830-48, a very small portion of the bourgeoisie ruled the 
kingdom; by far the larger part were excluded from the suffrage 
by the high qualification. Under the Second Republic, 1848-51, 
the whole bourgeoisie ruled, but for three years only; their 
incapacity brought on the Second Empire. It is only now, in the 
Third Republic, that the bourgeoisie as a whole have kept 
possession of the helm for more than twenty years; and they are 
already showing lively signs of decadence. A durable reign of the 
bourgeoisie has been possible only in countries like America, 
where feudalism was unknown, and society at the very beginning 
started from a bourgeois basis. And even in France and America, 
the successors of the bourgeoisie, the working people, are already 
knocking at the door. 

In England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even 
the victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive 
possession of all the leading Government offices. The meekness 
with which the wealthy middle class submitted to this, remained 
inconceivable to me until the great Liberal manufacturer, Mr. 
W. A. Forster, in a public speech implored the young men of 
Bradford to learn French, as a means to get on in the world, and 
quoted from his own experience how sheepish he looked when, as 
a Cabinet Minister, he had to move in society where French was, 
at least, as necessary as English! The fact was, the English middle 
class of that time were, as a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and 
could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior Govern- 
ment places where other qualifications were required than mere 
insular narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned by business 
sharpness.* Even now the endless newspaper debates about 
middle-class education show that the English middle class does not 
yet consider itself good enough for the best education, and looks 
to something more modest. Thus, even after the Repeal of the 
Corn Laws, it appeared a matter of course that the men who had 
carried the day, the Cobdens, Brights, Forsters, etc., should 
remain excluded from a share in the official government of the 
country, until twenty years afterwards, a new Reform Act?” 
opened to them the door of the Cabinet. The English bourgeoisie 
are, up to the present day, so deeply penetrated by a sense of 
their social inferiority that they keep up, at their own expense and 
that of the nation, an ornamental caste of drones to represent the 
nation worthily at all state functions; and they consider themselves 

* And even in business matters, the conceit of national chauvinism is but a 
sorry adviser. Up to quite recently, the average English manufacturer considered it 
derogatorv from an Englishman to speak any language but his own, and felt rather 
proud than otherwise of the fact that “poor devils” of foreigners settled in England 
and took off his hands the trouble of disposing of his products abroad. He never 
noticed that these foreigners, mostly Germans, thus got command of a very large 
part of British foreign trade, imports and exports, and that the direct foreign trade 
of Englishmen became limited, almost entirely, to the colonies, China, the United 
States, and South America. Nor did he notice that these Germans traded with other 
Germans abroad, who gradually organised a complete network of commercial 
colonies all over the world. But when Germany, about forty years ago, seriously 
began manufacturing for export, this network served her admirably in her 
transformation in so short a time, from a corn-exporting into a first-rate 
manufacturing country. Then, about ten years ago, the British manufacturer got 
frightened, and asked his ambassadors and consuls how it was that he could no 
longer keep his customers together. The unanimous answer was: (1) You don’t 
learn your customer’s language but expect him to speak your own; (2) You don’t 

even try to suit your customer’s wants, habits, and tastes, but expect him to 
conform to your English ones. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 299 

highly honoured whenever one of themselves is found worthy of 
admission into this select and privileged body, manufactured, after 
all, by themselves. 

The industrial and commercial middle class had, therefore, not 
yet succeeded in driving the landed aristocracy completely from 
political power when another competitor, the working class, 
appeared on the stage. The reaction after the Chartist movement 
and the continental revolutions, as well as’ the unparalleled 
extension of English trade from 1848 to 1866 (ascribed vulgarly to 
Free Trade alone, but due far more to the colossal development of 
railways, ocean steamers and means of intercourse generally), had 
again driven the working class into the dependency of the Liberal 
party, of which they formed, as in pre-Chartist times, the Radical 
wing. Their claims to the franchise, however, gradually became 
irresistible; while the Whig leaders of the Liberals “funked”’, 
Disraeli showed his superiority by making the Tories seize the 
favorable moment and introduce household suffrage* in the 
boroughs, along with a redistribution of seats. Then followed the 
ballot; then in 1884 the extension of household suffrage to the 
counties and a fresh redistribution of seats, by which electoral 
districts were to some extent equalised.”” All these measures 
considerably increased the electoral power of the working class, so 
much so that in at least 150 to 200 constituencies that class now 
furnishes the majority of voters. But parliamentary government is 
a capital school for teaching respect for tradition; if the middle 
class look with awe and veneration upon what Lord John Manners 
playfully called “our old nobility”, the mass of the working people 
then looked up with respect and deference to what used to be 
designated as “their betters’, the middle class. Indeed, the British 
workman, some fifteen years ago, was the model workman, whose 
respectful regard for the position of his master, and whose 
self-restraining modesty in claiming rights for himself, consoled 
our German economists of the Katheder-Socialist school?” for the 
incurable communistic and revolutionary tendencies of their own 
working men at home. 

But the English middle class—good men of business as they 
are—saw farther than the German professors. They had shared 
their power but reluctantly with the working class. They had 
learnt, during the Chartist years, what that puer robustus sed 
malitiosus, the people, is capable of. And since that time, they had 

a In Die Neue Zeit there follows: ‘which was extended to every lease-holder”.— 
Ed. 

been compelled to incorporate the better part of the People’s 
Charter in the Statutes of the United Kingdom. Now, if ever, the 
people must be kept in order by moral means, and the first and 
foremost of all moral means of action upon the masses is and 
remains—religion. Hence the parsons’ majorities on the school 
boards, hence the increasing self-taxation of the bourgeoisie for 
the support of all sorts of revivalism,* from ritualism?” to the 
Salvation Army. — 

And now came the triumph of British respectability” over the 
free thought and religious laxity of the continental bourgeois. The 
workmen of France and Germany had become rebellious. They 
were thoroughly infected with socialism, and, for very good 
reasons, were not at all particular as to the legality of the means by 
which to secure their own ascendency. The puer robustus, here, 
turned from day to day more malitiosus. Nothing remained to the 
French and German bourgeoisie as a last resource but to silently 
drop their free thought, as a youngster, when sea-sickness creeps 
upon him, quietly drops the burning cigar he brought swaggering- 
ly on board; one by one, the scoffers turned pious in outward 
behaviour, spoke with respect of the Church, its dogmas and rites, 
and even conformed with the latter as far as could not be helped. 
French bourgeois dined maigre on Fridays, and German ones sat 
out long Protestant sermons in their pews on Sundays. They had 
come to grief with materialism. “Die Religion muss dem Volk erhalten 
werden,’—rreligion must be kept alive for the people—that was the 
only and the last means to save society from utter ruin. 
Unfortunately for themselves, they did not find this out until they 
had done their level best to break up religion for ever. And now it 
was the turn of the British bourgeois to sneer and to say: “Why, 
you fools, I could have told you that two hundred years ago!” 

However, I am afraid neither the religious stolidity of the 
British, nor the post festum conversion of the continental bourgeois 
will stem the rising proletarian tide. Tradition is a great retarding 
force, is the vis inertiae of history, but, being merely passive, is 
sure to be broken down; and thus religion will be no lasting 
safeguard to capitalist society. If our juridical, philosophical, and 
religious ideas are the more or less remote offshoots of the 
economical relations prevailing in a given society, such ideas 

a Die Neue Zeit has “for the use of all possible means of pious demagogy”’ 
instead of “for the support of all sorts of revivalism”.— Ed. 

b Die Neue Zeit has “British respectable philistinism” instead of “British 
respectability” .— Ed. 

¢ Without ieat or milk.— Ed. 

Introduction to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific 301 

cannot, in the long run, withstand the effects of a complete 
change in these relations. And, unless we believe in supernatural 
revelation, we must admit that no religious tenets will ever suffice 
to prop up a tottering society. 

In fact, in England too, the working people have begun to move 
again. They are, no doubt, shackled by traditions of various kinds. 
Bourgeois traditions, such as the widespread belief that there can 
be but two parties, Conservatives and Liberals, and that the 
working class must work out its salvation by and through the great 
Liberal Party. Working men’s traditions, inherited from their first 
tentative efforts at independent action, such as the exclusion, from 
ever so many old Trade Unions, of all applicants who have not 
gone through a regular apprenticeship; which means the breeding 
by every such union, of its own blacklegs. But for all that the 
English working class is moving, as even Professor Brentano has 
sorrowfully had to report to his brother Katheder-Socialists.* It 
moves, like all things in England, with a slow and measured step, 
with hesitation here, with more or less unfruitful, tentative 
attempts there; it moves now and then with an over-cautious 
mistrust of the name of Socialism, while it gradually absorbs the 
substance; and the movement spreads and seizes one layer of the 
workers after another. It has now shaken out of their torpor the 
unskilled labourers of the East End of London, and we all know 
what a splendid impulse these fresh forces have given it in return. 
And if the pace of the movement is not up to the impatience of 
some people, let them not forget that it is the working class which 
keeps alive the finest qualities of the English character, and that, if 
a step in advance is once gained in England, it is, as a rule, never 
lost afterwards. If the sons of the old Chartists, for reasons 
explained above, were not quite up to the mark, the grandsons bid 
fair to be worthy of their forefathers. 

But the triumph of the European working class does not 
depend upon England alone. It can only be secured by the 
co-operation of, at least, England, France, and Germany. In both 
the latter countries the working-class movement is well ahead of 
England. In Germany it is even within measurable distance of 
success. The progress it has there made during the last twenty-five 
years is unparalleled. It advances with ever-increasing velocity. If 
the German middle class have shown themselves lamentably 
deficient in political capacity, discipline, courage, energy, and 

a This refers to L. Brentano’s writings dealing with British trade unions: Die 

Arbeitergilden der Gegenwart. Vol. 2: Zur Kritik der englischen Gewerkvereine. See also this 
volume, pp. 95-176.— Ed. 

perseverance, the German working class have given ample proof 
of all these qualities. Four hundred years ago, Germany was the 
starting-point of the first upheaval of the European middle class; 
as things are now, is it outside the limits of possibility that 
Germany will be the scene, too, of the first great victory of the 
European proletariat? 

F. Engels 
April 20th, 1892