''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy'' (German: ''Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie'') is a book published by

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ,"Engels"
'' The German Ideology ''The German Ideology'' (German: ''Die deutsche Ideologie'', sometimes written as ''A Critique of the German Ideology'') is a set of manuscripts originally written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels ...

'' written by Marx and Engels, but unpublished in their lifetime. The undertaking is performed to deal critically with German philosophy from a dialectical materialist position. Here Engels emphasized the importance of

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends ...

and

Ludwig Feuerbach Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (; 28 July 1804 – 13 September 1872) was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book '' The Essence of Christianity'', which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced gene ...

for their own theories. Hegel's idealist, conservative system must be distinguished from his materialist, revolutionary method of dialectics. Feuerbach had turned to law against Hegel's idealistic system and "the fundamental question of philosophy": the relation of thinking and being. But Feuerbach rejected Hegel's dialectical method, which is why his view of man and nature remained abstract and unhistorical. Marx only kept the "rational" content from the dialectical method and freed it from their idealistic form.

Publication history

The book was only about 50 pages long, and was written early in 1886, and published that year in "

Die Neue Zeit ''Die Neue Zeit'' (German: "The New Times") was a German socialist theoretical journal of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that was published from 1883 to 1923. Its headquarters was in Stuttgart, Germany. History and profile Founded ...

", issues No. 4 and 5. In 1888 a revised print by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz was published in Stuttgart, which contained some additional commentary by Engels. In this edition, Marx' 1845 ''

Theses on Feuerbach The "Theses on Feuerbach" are eleven short philosophical notes written by Karl Marx as a basic outline for the first chapter of the book ''The German Ideology'' in 1845. Like the book for which they were written, the theses were never published i ...

'' was also reprinted for the first time. The first English translation by Austin Lewis was published in the United States in 1903 by Charles H. Kerr & Company.

External links

''Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy''
''MEW'' 21, pp. 259–307.

to marxists.org {{Authority control 1886 non-fiction books Books by Friedrich Engels German philosophy Marxist books Dialectical materialism