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WorkFriedrich Engels

Landmarks of Scientific Socialism

Aimed at one rival's system and forced to cover everything he had touched, Engels's polemic became the first full exposition of Marxism — and the source of its most-read pamphlet.

by Friedrich Engels258 passages held

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Original title
Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft
First published
(aged 57)
Original language
German

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Overview

Eugen Dühring was a blind lecturer at the University of Berlin who had built a complete system — a philosophy, an economics, a socialism of his own — and by the mid-1870s his confident synthesis was winning converts inside the German Social-Democratic party, August Bebel and the young Eduard Bernstein among them. Marx and Engels watched a rival doctrine capture their movement from the inside. Pressed by party friends and by Marx, Engels gave two years to an answer, and because Dühring had pronounced on everything, the reply had to range over everything too: dialectics and the theory of knowledge, value and capital, the state, the family, the history of socialism. The polemic set out to bury one man and instead built the first ordered account of Marxism as a whole. Dühring's followers resisted it: serialized in the party paper Vorwärts across 1877 and 1878, it was shunted at the 1877 congress into a scientific supplement so the membership need not meet it. Marx himself contributed one chapter, on the history of political economy. Then in 1880 Engels lifted three chapters, reworked them, and issued them on their own as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. That short book travelled the world in dozens of languages and taught more people what Marxism was than Capital ever did, while the long refutation it had been cut from slipped quietly out of print.

Key concepts

Who was Dühring and why did Engels answer him?

Eugen Dühring was a blind lecturer at the University of Berlin who had built a complete system of philosophy, economics and socialism, and by the mid-1870s it was winning converts inside the German Social-Democratic party. Marx and Engels watched a rival doctrine capturing their own movement from within. Pressed by party friends and by Marx, Engels gave two years to a refutation that, because Dühring had pronounced on everything, had to cover everything too.

What is 'scientific' socialism as opposed to utopian?

Utopian socialism, for Engels, invents an ideal society and appeals to reason and morality to adopt it. Scientific socialism instead derives socialism from the actual development of capitalism, whose own contradictions prepare its supersession. It claims to describe a tendency already at work in history rather than a wish imposed on it. This distinction, drawn in the book, is the source of the widely read pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

What does Engels mean by dialectics?

A way of thinking that treats reality as process rather than as fixed things — everything arises, changes and passes, and contradiction and motion are real features of nature and history, not mistakes of reasoning. He opposes it to the metaphysical method that isolates and freezes its objects. Against Dühring's system of eternal final truths, Engels defends dialectics as the logic appropriate to a world that never stops moving.

What is surplus value?

It is Marx's explanation of profit, which Engels defends here: labour produces more value than the wage paid for it returns, and this difference — surplus value — is appropriated by the capitalist. Because it arises within an ordinary, voluntary exchange, exploitation requires no fraud or force; it is the system functioning normally. This makes inequality structural rather than a matter of individual wrongdoing, with decisive consequences for what could remedy it.

How did this book produce a famous pamphlet?

In 1880 Engels lifted three chapters from the long polemic, reworked them, and issued them on their own as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. That short book travelled the world in dozens of languages and taught more people what Marxism was than Capital ever did, while the full refutation it had been cut from slipped quietly out of print. The pamphlet is the reason the larger work is remembered at all.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Marxism laid out whole

What is the shape of the whole doctrine, once someone finally sets it down in order? A polemic meant to bury one rival became the first ordered account of Marxism itself.

Because Dühring had pronounced on everything, Engels's reply had to range over everything too — and in answering him it built, almost by accident, the first systematic exposition of Marxism as a connected whole. Historical materialism appears here not as scattered insight but as a method: societies are explained by their modes of production, and socialism arrives not as a moral ideal to be preached but as the outcome of forces already at work in capitalism. Engels calls this the scientific socialism that supersedes the utopian kind. Three reworked chapters became the pamphlet that taught more people what Marxism was than Capital ever did.

  • historical materialism
  • materialism
  • socialism
  • history
  • critique
  • ideology
  • science
  • epistemology

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Reality as process

Is the world a set of fixed things or a movement in which nothing stays put? Against Dühring's finished system Engels sets a dialectic that treats change and contradiction as the truth of nature and history.

Dühring offered a complete, eternal system of final truths; Engels answers that reality is process, that everything arises, changes and passes, and that contradiction and motion are not errors of thought but features of the world itself. He defends dialectics as the logic fit for a nature and a history in flux, against the metaphysical habit of treating things as fixed and isolated. The quarrel is methodological before it is political: whether knowledge should aim at a closed system of settled truths or track a reality that never stops moving. Engels's answer underwrites the whole materialist account that follows.

  • dialectics
  • contradiction
  • motion
  • metaphysics
  • logic
  • methodology
  • philosophy of science
  • evolution
  • biology

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Where profit comes from

Does the wealth of the capitalist rest on force and cunning, or on something quieter built into the wage itself? Engels defends Marx's answer against a rival who had staked everything on force.

Dühring rooted economic inequality in force — domination and robbery imposed from outside the economy. Engels replies with Marx's account: exploitation is internal and lawful, arising because labour produces more value than the wage returns, and the difference, surplus value, is appropriated as profit within an ordinary, voluntary exchange. No cheating is required; the mechanism is the system working normally. Marx himself contributed a chapter on the history of political economy. The point is decisive for the politics: if inequality is structural rather than a matter of villainy, then reform of manners cannot cure it and only a change of the system can.

  • political economy
  • value
  • surplus value
  • capital
  • labor
  • capitalism
  • force
  • cosmology

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Within this work

passages held
258
distinct concepts
491
by passages held, corpus-wide
#288

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “capitalism” and “historical materialism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 92 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
capitalismhistorical materialism6
dialecticsepistemology5
historical materialismsocialism5
dialecticsmaterialism4
historical materialismpolitical economy4
capitalismsocialism3
dialecticshistorical materialism3
capitalismpolitical economy2
dialecticsevolution2
dialecticssocialism2
epistemologymaterialism2
political economysocialism2
capitalismdialectics1
dialecticspolitical economy1
evolutionhistorical materialism1
evolutionmaterialism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England)

    Engels's first major book, written at twenty-four before he had properly met Marx; its documentary materialism fed the partnership and the histories that followed.

     DE
  2. 1877 Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft) you are here EN
  3. 1883 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft)

    Three chapters of Anti-Dühring, reworked in 1880 into a pamphlet for French readers and issued in German in 1883. By Engels's own count, in his introduction to the English edition of 1892, it had reached ten languages, and he knew of no socialist work translated so often, not even the Communist Manifesto or Capital.

     DE
  4. 1886 Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy (Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie)

    The 1888 book edition carried the first printing of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach; Engels had written the essay in 1886 to review a study of Feuerbach and retrace his and Marx's exit from Hegel.

     EN
  5. 1896 The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (Anteil der Arbeit an der Menschwerdung des Affen)

    A fragment from the unfinished Dialectics of Nature, in which Engels turned his materialism on natural science and human origins; the rest of that project went unpublished until 1925.

     DE
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