''Anti-Dühring'' (, "Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science") is a book by
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels" ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.Vorwärts.'' There were two further German editions in Engels' lifetime. ''Anti-Dühring'' was first published in English translation in 1907.
Contents
This work was one of Engels's major contributions to the exposition and development of Marxist theory. Its full title translates as ''Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science'': this is meant ironically and polemically. The short title recalls
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar (12 or 13 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in Caesar's civil wa ...
socialism
Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...
, intended as a replacement for
Marxism
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...
. Since
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
was busy at the time with writing ''
Das Kapital
''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' (), also known as ''Capital'' or (), is the most significant work by Karl Marx and the cornerstone of Marxian economics, published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his ...
'', it was left to Engels to write a general defence. The sections are ''Philosophy'', ''Political Economy'' and ''Socialism''.
Among communists, it is a popular and enduring work which, as Engels wrote to Marx, was an attempt "to produce an encyclopaedic survey of our conception of the philosophical, natural-science and historical problems."
Part of it was published separately in 1880 in France as '' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific''. An English translation was published in 1892. This work also influenced '' Materialism and Empirio-criticism'' by
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...
.
In the book, Engels articulated one of the classic definitions of the term political economy: "Political economy, in the widest sense, is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society ... Political economy is therefore essentially a ''historical'' science. It deals with material which is historical, that is, constantly changing."
In his biography of Marx, Isaiah Berlin found the most readable section to be that subsequently published separately under the title '' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'' which he described as "the best brief autobiographical appreciation of Marxism by one of its creators. ... Written in Engels's best vein thad a decisive influence on both Russian and German Socialism."Berlin, I. (1963). ''Karl Marx, his life and environment'' (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 221
This work is also the source of a widely quoted aphorism: "The state is not abolished, it withers away.""Withering Away of the State." In ''The Encyclopedia of Political Science'', edited by George Thomas Kurian. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011. http://library.cqpress.com/teps/encyps_1775.1. Another well-known sentence refers approvingly to Hegel: "To him, freedom is the insight into necessity (''die Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit'')."