空想から科学へのあらすじ

The 8 key ideas

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   A pamphlet born from a quarrel with Dühring

   The book begins as a fight. Around 1875 Eugen Dühring, a lecturer in Berlin, announced that he had become a socialist. He offered the German public a complete theory and a plan for reorganizing society, and he poured his anger on Marx.

   Engels saw a danger. The two German socialist parties had just merged, and their unity was their strength. Dühring was gathering a sect, the seed of a rival party. So Engels answered him in newspaper articles and later in a large book. Three chapters of it became a pamphlet that Paul Lafargue translated in 1880.

   The preface to the English edition defines historical materialism as the view that the deepest cause of great events lies in how goods are produced and exchanged, in the classes this creates, and in their struggles. He also answers the agnostics: action settles the matter, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

   The book is a compact defence of a method, written in answer to a rival system.

2. 2

   Religion often wears the clothes of class interest

   In the preface Engels uses his method on a puzzle.

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3. 3

   The kingdom of reason was a bourgeois kingdom

   Chapter one turns to the roots of modern socialism.

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4. 4

   Saint-Simon and Fourier saw further than their plans

   Engels does not mock the utopians.

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5. 5

   Owen shows what a mill can do and what it cannot

   Robert Owen is the most practical of the three, and Engels gives him the most room.

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6. 6

   Seeing the world as a process, not a heap of things

   Chapter two turns from reformers to method.

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7. 7

   Production has become social but ownership stays private

   Chapter three is the core argument.

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8. 8

   Society takes over production and the state dies out

   If the crises show the bourgeoisie cannot manage modern forces of production, what comes next?

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