Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877
1 Anti-Dühring is the title under which Engels’ classic work Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science is widely known.
The attention of Marx and Engels was first drawn to Dühring when his review of Volume One of Capital was published in Ergänzungsblätter, Vol. III, issue No. 3, in December 1867. They expressed a critical attitude towards him in a number of letters of January to March 1868.
In the mid-1870s, Dühring exerted quite a significant influence on German Social-Democrats. The second edition of Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus (November 1875) and the publication of Cursus der Philosophie als Streng Wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung (the last issue appeared in February 1875) made his views more popular. His most active followers were Johann Most, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche and Eduard Bernstein. Even August Bebel came under the influence of Dühring's views for a short time. In March 1874, two of Bebel's articles about Dühring published anonymously under the title “Ein neuer ‘Communist’” in the Volksstaat, the central organ of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (Eisenachers), aroused sharp protest on the part of Marx and Engels.
The spread of Dühring's views made Liebknecht, on February 1 and April 21, 1875, propose to Engels that they be criticised in the Volksstaat.
Engels criticised Dühring for the first time in February 1876, in an article “Prussian Vodka in the German Reichstag”, published in Volksstaat (see present edition, Vol. 24). Later, in his letter to Marx of May 24, 1876, he writes of the need to initiate a campaign against the spread of Dühring’s views in Germany. Replying on May 25, Marx supported Engels’ idea and suggested that, first of all, Dühring himself be sharply criticised (see present edition, Vol. 45). Engels broke off his work on Dialectics of Nature, and by May 28 informed Marx of the general plan and character of the proposed work.
Engels worked on Anti-Dühring for two years — from late May 1876 to early July 1878. Part I of the book was written mainly between September 1876 and January 1877. It was published as a series of articles entitled Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Philosophie in Vorwärts in January-May 1877 (Nos. 1-7, 10 and 11, January 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17, 24 and 26; Nos. 17, 24 and 25, February 9, 25 and 28; Nos. 36 and 37, March 25 and 28; Nos. 44, 45, 49 and 50, April 15, 18, 27 and 29; Nos. 55 and 56, May 11 and 13). Later, beginning in 1878, with the first separate edition, the first two chapters of this part were made into an independent general introduction to all three parts.
Part II of the book was written mainly between June and August 1877. The last,x chapter of this part was written by Marx (see this volume, pp. 9, 15). In addition, in his letters to Engels of March 7 and August 8, 1877, Marx explained a number of economic problems, especially those connected with Quesnay's Tabkau économique, which was difficult to understand. Engels also read the whole manuscript of Anti-Dühring to Marx before sending it to the printers.
Part II was published under the title Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der politischen Oekonomie in Wissenschaftliche Beilage and in the supplement to Vorwärts from July to December 1877 (No. 87, July 27; Nos. 93 and 96, August 10 and 17; Nos. 105 and 108, September 7 and 14; No. 127, October 28; Nos. 130 and 139, November 4 and 28; No. 152, December 30).
Part III of the book was written mainly between August 1877 and April 1878. It was published as Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung des Sozialismus in the supplement to Vorwärts in May to July 1878 (Nos. 52 and 61, May 5 and 26; Nos. 64 and 75, June 2 and 28; No. 79, July 7).
The publication of Anti-Dühring in Vorwärts aroused strong resistance on the part of Dühring’s followers. At the next congress of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, in Gotha from May 27 to 29, 1877, they attempted to ban the publication of this work in the Party's central organ. It was due to them that Anti-Dühring was being printed at lengthy intervals.
In July 1877, Part I of Engels’ work was published in Leipzig as a separate pamphlet: Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft. 1. Philosophie. In July 1878, Parts 11 and III were also published as a separate pamphlet: Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft. 11. Politische Oekonomie. Sozialismus.
The entire work was first published in book form in Leipzig on about July 8, 1878, with a preface by Engels: F. Engels, Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft. Philosophie. Politische Oekonomie. Sozialismus. Its title is an ironical paraphrase of the title of Dühring's work Carey's Umwälzung der Volkswirtschaftslehre und Socialwissenschaft. At the end of October 1878, after the Anti-Socialist Law had been put into force in Germany, Anti-Dühring was banned along with Engels’ other works. Its second edition appeared in Zurich, in 1886. The third, revised and supplemented edition was published in Stuttgart, in 1894, i.e., after the Anti-Socialist Law was repealed (1890). This was the last edition during Engels’ lifetime. The second and third editions bore the same title. but the subtitle Philosophie. Politische Oekonomie. Sozialismus was omitted.
In 1880, at Paul Lafargue's request, Engels used three chapters of Anti-Dühring (Chapter I of the Introduction and chapters I and 11 of Part III) to provide a separate popular pamphlet, first published under the title Socialism Utopian and Scientific, and later as The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science (see present edition, Vol. 24).
Anti-Dühring was published in English for the first time in 1907, in Chicago as F. Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism. Anti-Dühring. Translated and edited by Austin Lewis. This work has been repeatedly reprinted.
2 At the congress held in Gotha from May 22 to 27, 1875, the two trends in the German working-class movement — the Social-Democratic Workers' Party (Eisenachers), headed by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, and the Lassallean General Association of German Workers — united into the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany.
3 The reference is in particular to August Bebel's article "Ein neuer 'Communist'", printed anonymously in the Volksstaat on March 13 and 20, 1874 with a favourable review of Dühring's book Cursus der National- und Sozialökonomie, einschlieslich der Hauptpunkte der Finanzpolitik and describing Dühring as a supporter of scientific socialism.
4 The reference is to lectures given to the Berlin workers on the solution of social problems, in July 1876 by Most, who popularised Dühring's views. These lectures came out as a separate pamphlet in 1876 in Berlin: J. Most, Die Lösung der socialen Frage. Dühring's views were also actively disseminated by the Social-Democratic newspaper Berliner Freie Presse.
5 This refers to the protest lodged by Most with the editors of the Volksstaat, who did not print his article praising Dühring and Fritzsche's speech at the regular congress of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany in August 1876, demanding that the Party's central organ Volksstaat disseminate Dühring's ideas.
6 The Sixth World Industrial Fair opened in Philadelphia on May 10, 1876 in connection with the centenary of the founding of the USA (July 4, 1776). Reuleaux, director of the Berlin Industrial Academy appointed by the German Government as chairman of the German panel of judges, had to admit that German-made goods were far inferior to those of other countries and that German industry's guiding principle was "cheap and nasty". This statement evoked wide comment in the press. From July to September, the Volksstaat, for instance, published a series of articles on this scandalous fact.
7 The phrase "really never learnt a word", which gained wide currency, is to be found in a letter by the French Admiral de Panat. It is sometimes ascribed to Talleyrand. It was made with reference to the royalists, who proved incapable of drawing any lessons from the French Revolution of the late 18th century.
8 The Anti-Socialist Law was passed by the German Reichstag on October 21, 1878, to counter the socialist and working-class movement. Extended in 1881, 1884, 1886, 1888, it banned all party organisations, mass workers' organisations and the socialist and labour press; Social-Democrats were subjected to reprisals. The Social-Democratic Party, with the help of Marx and Engels, managed, however, to overcome the opportunist (Hochberg, Bernstein and others) and "ultra-Left" (Most and others) tendencies in its ranks and, while the law was in force, correctly combined legal and illegal work to strengthen and extend its influence considerably among the masses. The law was abrogated on October 1, 1890. Engels assesses it in the article "Bismarck and the German Working Men's Party" for The Labour Standard.
9 The Holy Alliance — an association of European monarchs, founded in 1815 by Tsarist Russia, Austria and Prussia, to suppress revolutionary movements and preserve feudal monarchies in European countries.
10 This manuscript, to which Marx himself gave the title Randnoten zu Dührings Kritische Geschichte der National ökonomie, was written before March 5, 1877 and then sent to Engels. It was first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CC CPSU in: Marx / Engels Gesamiausgabe, F. Engels, Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Wissenschaft/Dialektik der Natur. Sonderausgabe, Moscow-Leningrad, 1935, pp. 341-71.
11 Dühring attempted to refute some of Engels' criticisms in the book: Dühring, Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus, Dritte, theilweise umgearbeitete Auflage, Leipzig, 1879, pp. 566-67.
12 In July 1877, Dühring was deprived of the right to lecture at Berlin University for his sharp criticism of university practices. His dismissal sparked off a vociferous protest campaign by his supporters and was condemned by broad democratic circles.
13 Initially, the French translation was made by Lafargue, and published under the title Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique in the journal Revue socialiste, Nos. 3-5, March-May 1880. p. 10
14 The Russian translation was first published, as Scientific Socialism, in the illegal journal Students, No. 1, of December 1882, a separate pamphlet The Development of Scientific Socialism was put out by the Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva, in 1884.
15 Engels left his Manchester business on July 1, 1869 and moved to London on September 20, 1870.
16 In the introduction to his fundamental work on agrochemistry, Justus Liebig speaks of the evolution of his scientific views and notes: "Chemistry is moving forward at an incredible speed, and the chemists wishing to keep up with it are in a state of constant moulting. One sheds one's old feathers, no longer suitable for flight, but new ones grow in their stead and one flies all the better." See 1. Liebig, Die Chemie in ibrer Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologiz, 7. Aufl., Braunschweig, 1862, Th. I, p. 26.
17 This refers to the letter written by the German Social-Democrat Heinrich Wilhelm Fabian to Marx on November 6, 1880 (Engels described Fabian in his letters to Kautsky of April 11, 1884, to Bernstein of September 13, 1884, and to Sorge of June 3, 1885. See MECW, Vol. 47).
18 Marx's 1,000-odd sheets of mathematical manuscripts were written mainly in the 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s. The most complete texts of these manuscripts and the abstracts and excerpts of Marx's own notes were first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the language of the original and translated into Russian in K. Marx, Mathematical Manuscripts, Moscow, 1968.
19 A reference to the works of the Irish physicist Thomas Andrews (1869), the French physicist Louis Paul Cailletet and the Swiss physicist Raoul Pierre Pictet (1877).
20 According to the theory expounded by Rudolf Virchow in Die Cellularpathologie, first published in 1858, the individual animal breaks up into tissue, the tissue into cell-states, and the cell-states into cells, so that, in the final analysis, the individual animal is a mechanical sum of separate cells.
Speaking of the "progressive" nature of this theory, Engels alludes to Virchow's membership of the German bourgeois Party of Progress, organised in June 1861. p. I}
21 This refers to Rousseau's theory of equality (see this volume, p. 129) expounded in his Discours sur l'origine et les fondemens de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, Amsterdam, 1755, and Du contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique, Amsterdam, 1762.
22 The Reformation (16th century) — a broad socio-political and ideological movement of a complex social content and composition. It assumed a religious form of struggle against the Catholic doctrine and Church and was basically anti-feudal in character; it spread over most of Western and Central Europe.
The Peasant War of 1524-26 — the biggest insurrection of German peasants (supported by townspeople) against the feudal yoke in South-western and Middle Germany.
The Levelers — the "true Levellers" or "Diggers" — representatives of the ultra-Left trend during the English bourgeois revolution of the mid-17th century, consisting of the poorest sections of the population, suffering from feudal and capitalist exploitation in town and countryside.
23 Engels has in mind, first of all, the works of Thomas More (Utopia published in 1516) and Tommaso Campanella (City of the Sun, published in 1623).
24 Denis Diderot's discourse Le neveu de Rameau was written in about 1762 and subsequently revised twice by the author. It was first published, in Goethe's German translation, in Leipzig in 1805; in French in Oeuveres inédites de Diderot, Paris, 1821, put out, in fact, in 1823.
25 The Alexandrian period (the Alexandrian culture, the Alexandrian age) derives its name from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which was a major centre of Hellenic culture. Alexandria, to which city thousands of Greeks moved in the 3rd century B.C., witnessed a rapid advance of mathematics, mechanics (Euclid, Archimedes), geography, astronomy, physiology and other sciences.
26 Laplace's hypothesis of the origin of the solar system was first expounded in the last chapter of his treatise Exposition du systéme du monde, T. I-II, Paris, 4th year of the French Republic {1796}. In the last, sixth edition of this book, prepared during Laplace's lifetime and published posthumously, in 1835, the hypothesis is expounded in the last, seventh note.
The existence of incandescent masses of gas was proved in 1864 by the English astronomer William Huggins, who made widespread use of the method of spectral analysis (evolved in 1859 by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen) in astronomy. Here Engels used A. Secchi's Die Sonne, Braunschweig, 1872, pp. 787, 789-90.
27 In the first German edition of Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (1882), Engels introduced fundamental specification, which was repeated in the authorised English edition (1892). He formulated the given proposition in the following words: "...all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles..."
28 Dühring's works, quoted by Engels, are referred to in brackets in abbreviated form in the following way:
D.Ph. stands for: Dühring, Cursus der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1875
D.K.G. stands for: Dühring, Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus, 2. Aufl., Berlin, 1875;
D.C. stands for: Dühring, Cursus der National- und Socialökonomie, 2. Aufl., Leipzig, 1876,
and the relevant pages.
29 Phalansteries — the buildings in which, according to the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, the members of phalanges, ideal harmonious communities, would live and work.
30 G. W. F. Hegel's Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Heidelberg, 1817 consists of three parts: 1) logic, 2) philosophy of nature, 3) philosophy of the mind.
In his work on Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, Engels used Hegel's writings primarily published after Hegel's death by his pupils in: G. W. F. Hegel, Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten: Ph. Marheineke, J. Schulze, Ed. Gans, Lp. v. Henning, H. Hotho, C. Michekt, F. Förster, Bd. I-XVIII, Berlin, 1832-1845.
31 Engels is presumably alluding to Die Epiphanie der ewigen Persönlichkeit des Christes (published in separate installments in 1844, 1847 and 1852), the work of the Hegelian philosopher K. L. Michelet, who published the works of his teacher.
32 Engels made a note here, which he subsequently included in Dialectics of Nature.
33 In the original, here and elsewhere, the term "Ideologie" is used, as a rule, as a synonym for "idealism".
34 This is an allusion to the servile submissiveness of the Prussians, who accepted the Constitution granted by King Frederick William IV on December 5, 1848, when the Prussian Constituent Assembly was dissolved. The Constitution drawn up with the participation of the Minister of the Interior, Baron Manteuffel, was finally approved by Frederick William IV on January 31, 1850, after numerous amendments had been introduced.
35 In Part I of Anti-Dühring, all page references made by Engels are to Dühring's Cursus der Philosophie.
36 Engels enumerates a number of major battles in European wars of the nineteenth century.
The battle of Austerlitz (now Slavkov in Czechoslovakia), December 2, 1805, in which Napoleon I defeated a combined Russo-Austrian army.
The battle of Jena, October 14, 1806, in which Napoleon I crushed the Prussian army.
The battle of Königgrätz (now Hradec Kralove), or of Sadowa, July 3, 1866, in Bohemia, in which Prussian forces defeated the army of Austria and Saxony, thereby securing Prussia's victory over Austria in the war of 1866.
The battle of Sedan, September 1-2, 1870, in which Prussian forces defeated the French army under MacMahon and compelled it to surrender. This was the decisive battle in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.
37 A reference to the research carried out by the German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss into non-Euclidean geometry.
37a In the original a play on words: Eslesbrücke (asses' bridge) means in German also an unauthorised aid in study used by dull-headed or lazy students; a crib or pony.
38 In 1886, in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels wrote the following on the Copernican system: "For three hundred years the Copernican solar system was a hypothesis with a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand chances to one in its favour, but still always a hypothesis. But when Leverrier, by means of the data provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when Galle really found this planet, the Copernican system was proved". The planet mentioned in the quotation is Neptune, which was discovered in 1846 by Johann Galle of the Berlin Observatory.
39 Engels made a note here, which he subsequently included in Dialectics of Nature (see MECW, volume 25, pp. 530-34).
40 Protista (from the Greek protistos — meaning first) are, according to Haeckel's classification, a vast group of simple, both unicellular and non-cellular, organisms.
Monera (from the Greek moneres — meaning single) are, according to Haeckel, structureless masses of albumen, devoid of a nucleus but performing all the essential vital functions: eating, locomotion, reaction to irritation, multiplication.
The terms protista and monera were introduced by Haeckel in 1866 in his book Generelle Morphologie der Organismen.
41 The reference is to the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and the Accadian version of the Deluge story discovered in 1872 by George Smith, the English Assyriologist and archaeologist.
42 Ring of the Nibelung — Richard Wagner's monumental tetralogy: Rheingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.
Here Engels jokingly calls Dühring the "composer of the future", referring to the term "composition" proposed by Dühring. Wagner's adversaries had ironically called his music the "music of the future", the occasion being Wagner's book Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, Leipzig, 1850.
43 Zoophytes — a name which, from the sixteenth century onwards, designated a group of invertebrates (mainly sponges and coelenterata). From the mid-nineteenth century, the term zoophytes was used as a synonym for coelenterata; it has now dropped out of use.
44 This classification was given in Huxley's Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy, London, 1864, Lecture V. It provided the basis for H. A. Nicholson's Manual of Zoology (first published in 1870), which Engels used in his work on Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature.
45 Traube's artificial cells — inorganic formations representing a model of living cells; they were created by the German chemist and physiologist Moritz Traube by mixing colloidal solutions. He read a paper on his experiments to the 47th Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in Breslau, on September 23 1874. Marx and Engels thought highly of Traube's discovery (see Marx's letter to Pyotr Lavrov of June 18, 1875, and to Wilhelm Alexander Freund of January 21, 1877, MECW, Vol. 45).
46 Here Engels relates a report in the journal Nature of November 16, 1876 dealing with the paper read by Dmitry Mendeleyev on September 3, 1876 at the 5th Congress of Russian Naturalists and Physicians in Warsaw. Mendeleyev reported on the results of his experiments, conducted jointly with Jozef Jerzy Boguski in 1875-76, to verify the Boyle-Mariotte law.
Engels evidently wrote this note when checking the proof of this chapter of Anti-Dühring, which was printed in Vorwärts on February 28, 1877. Engels added the end of the note, given in parentheses, in 1885, when he was preparing the second edition of Anti-Dühring.
47 Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondemens de l'inégalité parmi les hommes was written in 1754 and published in 1755.
48 The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) — an all-European war caused by the struggle between Protestants and Catholics. Germany became the main arena of this war, and consequently the object of military pillage and the predatory claims of the belligerents.
49 This refers to Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Leipzig, 1845; for criticism of it see The German Ideology by Marx and Engels.
50 Engels' main source of data on these events was, evidently, the American diplomat Eugene Schuyler's Turkistan. Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Buthara, and Kuldja, in two volumes, Vol. II, London, 1876, pp. 356-59.
51 The American Constitution of 1787, officially proclaiming the USA a federal republic, was the most progressive bourgeois constitution of its time. Yet it virtually legalised slavery. Marx wrote on this: "The Constitution ... recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect this property" (see MECW, Vol. 19, p. 36).
52 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Bd. 1, 2. Aufl., Hamburg, 1872, p. 36 (Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 3, A, 3: The Equivalent Form of Value).
In Anti-Dühring, Engels quotes from the 2nd German edition of Vol. I of Capital. He used the 3rd German edition of Capital, Vol. I only when he revised Part II, ChapterX for the 3rd edition of Anti-Dühring.
53 Lassalle was arrested in February 1848 on a charge of inciting to steal a cash-box with documents to be used in the divorce case of Countess Sophie Hatzfeldt, whose lawyer he was from 1846 to 1854. Lassalle's trial took place from August 5 to 11, 1848; he was acquitted by a jury.
54 Code pénal — the French Penal Code, adopted in 1810, which came into force in France and French-conquered regions of Western and South-western Germany in 1811; along with the Civil Code, it remained in force in the Rhine Province after it had been annexed by Prussia in 1815.
55 Code Napoléon — the French Civil Code was adopted in 1804. Engels called it "a classical legal code of bourgeois society" in his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (see MECW, Vol. 26).
Here Engels is speaking of it in the broad sense, having in mind the five codes adopted under Napoleon from 1804 to 1810: civil, civil-procedure, trade, criminal and criminal-procedure.
56 In Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata et in quinque parses distincta (first published in Amsterdam in 1677), Part 1, Addendum, Spinoza said that ignorance is no argument, in opposition to the clerical-teleological view that everything is determined by "divine Providence" as the final cause and that the only means of argumentation is the plea of ignorance of other causes.
57 Corpus juris civilis — code of civil laws regulating property relations in Roman slave-owning society; it was drawn up from 528 to 534 under the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels described it as the "first world law of a commodity-producing society" (see MECW, Vol. 26).
58 The law on the compulsory civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was passed in Prussia on October 1, 1874 and a similar one for the whole German Empire on February 6, 1875. The law deprived the Church of the right to such registration, thereby considerably curtailing its influence and income. It was directed primarily against the Catholic Church.
59 The reference is to the provinces of Brandenburg, East Prussia, West Prussia, Posen, Pomerania and Silesia, which were part of the Kingdom of Prussia until the Vienna Congress of 1815.
60 Personal equation — a correction made for variation in astronomical observation due to a person's individual peculiarities.
61 Dühring drew these data on the structure of Marx's Capital from the Preface to the first German edition (see present edition, Vol. 35). From 1867 onwards, when Vol. I of Capital was published, Marx's plan was to have the entire work brought out in three volumes in four books, the 2nd and the 3rd of which were to comprise Vol. II. After Marx's death, Engels published the 2nd and 3rd books as vols. II and III. The last, fourth book, Theories of Surplus-Value, was published after Engels' death.
62 Chapter XXIV of Vol. I of Capital — "The So-called Primitive Accumulation" — takes up pp. 742-93 of the 1872 German edition. The last, seventh paragraph of this chapter — "Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation" — begins on p. 791 of that edition.
63 The reference is to Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondemens de l'inégalité' parmi les hommes, written in 1754. Below, Engels quotes the second part of this work (1755 edition, pp. 116, 118, 146, 175-76 and 176-77).
64 The expression determinatio est negatio is to be found in Spinoza's letter to Jarigh Jelles of June 2, 1674 (see B. Spinoza, Epistolae doctorum quorundam virorum ad B. de Spinoza et auctoris responsiones ..., Letter 50), where it is used in the sense of "determination is a negation". The expression omnis determinatio est negatio and its interpretation as "every determination is a negation" are to be found in Hegel's works, from which they have become widely known (see G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Teil, § 91, Zusatz Die Wissenschaft der Logik, Erstes Buch, Erster Abschnitt, Zweites Kapitei: "b. Qualitat"; Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte dkr Philosophie, Erster Teil, Erster Abschnitt, Erstes Kapitel, Paragraph uber Parmenides).
65 Engels has in mind, above all, Marx's works The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Vol. I of Capital (1867). Marx carried out a thorough study of pre-capitalist forms of production in his Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58 (first version of Capital).
66 In Part II, except Chapter X, of Anti-Dühring, Engels quotes from the second (1876) edition of Dühring's Cursus der National- und Socialökonomie.
67 Reptiles — a nickname widespread in Germany in the 1870s for journalists subsidised by the government. This expression, but in a different sense, was used by Bismarck on January 30, 1869, in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies, this time with reference to the government's adversaries.
68 Engels is referring to the July Revolution of 1830 in France, which brought big bankers and industrialists to power; from this time on, as a result of the final victory of the bourgeoisie over the nobility, the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie came to the fore.
69 The Restoration — the second rule of the Bourbon dynasty in France (1814-15, 1815-30), overthrown by the Revolution at the end of the 18th century. It was brought to an end by the July Revolution of 1830.
70 Engels took these facts from W. Wachsmuth's Hellinische Alterthumskunde aus dem Gesichtspunkte des Staates, Th. II, Abth. I, Halle, 1829.
The source for the number of slaves in Corinth and Aegina during the Greco-Persian wars (5th cent. B.C.), is Banquet of Sophists, Book VI, by the ancient Greek writer Athenaeus.
71 This refers to absolute monarchy (absolutism) — a form of state in the last period of the existence of feudalism.
72 The reference is to the guns produced by Krupps, the biggest German steel firm, and rifles designed and produced by the German engineers and entrepreneurs, the Mauser brothers.
73 Engels means the protracted economic crisis of 1873-79 in German industry, in spite of the seizure of Alsace and East Lorraine and the 5,000 million francs of war indemnities that France paid to Germany under the terms of the Frankfurt peace treaty (1871), after her defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.
74 The War of Independence in North America (1775-83) was the first bourgeois revolution on the American continent.
75 A reference to the bourgeois-democratic revolution in France at the end of the 18th century.
76 The Prussian Landwehr system provided for the formation of army units from among people of the older age groups who were liable to military service and had served in the regular army and been in the reserve for the established period. The Landwehr first appeared in Prussia in 1813-14 as a people's militia to combat Napoleon.
77 The reference is to the Austro-Prussian war of 1866.
78 In the battle of Saint-Privat, or of Cravelotte, August 18, 1870, the German troops defeated the French Rhenish army at the cost of enormous losses.
79 The Crimean war (1853-56) between Russia and a coalition of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia, broke out as a result of a clash of their economic and political interests in the Middle East.
80 The reference is to the guns produced by Krupps, the biggest German steel firm, and rifles designed and produced by the German engineers and entrepreneurs, the Mauser brothers.
81 The phrase in parentheses was added by Engels in the third edition of Anti-Dühring.
82 Dühring called his "dialectics" "natural dialectics" to distinguish it from Hegel's "unnatural" dialectics. See E. Dühring, Naturliche Dialektik. Neue logische Grundlegungen der Wissenschaft und Philosophie, Berlin, 1865, p. 13.
83 Dealing with a common subject, the works of Georg Ludwig Maurer (12 volumes) study the agrarian, urban and state system of mediaeval Germany. These works are: Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf- und Stadt Verfassung und der öffentlichen Gewalt, Munchen, 1854; Geschichte der Markenverfassung in Deutschland, Erlangen, 1856; Geschichte der Fronhöfe, der Bauernhöfe und der Hofverfassung in Deutschland, Bd. I-IV, Erlangen, 1862-63; Geschichte der Dorfverfassung in Deutschland, Bd. 1-11, Erlangen, 1865-66; Geschichte der Städteverfassung in Deutschechland Bd. I-IV, Erlangen, 1869-71. The first, second and fourth of these works are devoted to a study of the German mark system.
84 Engels ironically changes the title of Heinrich LXXII — one of the two influential Reuss princes of the Younger branch (Reuss-Lobenstein-Ebersdorf). Greiz — capital of the Reuss principality (Elder branch, Reuss-Greiz). Schleiz — a domain of the Reuss princes (Younger branch, Reuss-Schleiz) — was not a possession of Heinrich LXXII.
85 This is an expression from Frederick William IV's New Year message (January 1, 1849) to the Prussian Army. For a critical assessment of this message see Marx's article "A New-Year Greeting" (MECW, Vol. 8, pp. 222-26).
86 The reference is to the laws on maximum prices adopted by the revolutionary government during the War of Independence in North America and the National Convention during the French Revolution.
87 A detailed criticism of the Lassallean slogan of "full" or unlimited "proceeds of labour" is given in Section 1 of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme.
88 Marx intended to include the third book in Vol. II of Capital.
89 According to a Biblical story, when Jericho was besieged by the Israelites under Joshua, its impregnable walls came tumbling down at the sound of holy trumpets and the shouts of the besiegers (Joshua 6: 1-4, 9, 19).
90 This is an allusion to King Frederick Wilhelm IV's speech from the throne at the opening of the United Diet in Prussia on April 11, 1847, in which he stated that he would never allow "the natural relations between the monarch and the people" to be turned into "conventional, constitutional ones" and "the used up sheet of paper" take the place of "primordial holy loyalty".
91 Engels enumerates a number of major battles in European wars of the nineteenth century.
The battle of Austerlitz (now Slavkov in Czechoslovakia), December 2, 1805, ; in which Napoleon I defeated a combined Russo-Austrian army.
The battle of Jena, October 14, 1806, in which Napoleon I crushed the Prussian army.
The battle of Königgrätz (now Hradec Kralove), or of Sadowa, July 3, 1866, in Bohemia, in which Prussian forces defeated the army of Austria and Saxony, thereby securing Prussia's victory over Austria in the war of 1866.
The battle of Sedan, September 1-2, 1870, in which Prussian forces defeated -the French army under MacMahon and compelled it to surrender. This was the decisive battle in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.
92 This chapter, based on Marx's manuscript of 1877 was evidently edited by Engels in the second half of May 1894, while he was preparing the third German edition of Anti-Dühring. That is why this chapter contains a reference to the third German edition of Marx's Capital (1883). Engels restored Marx's original text as fully as possible. The main object of Marx's criticism here was the second edition of Dühring's Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus, in which the author attempted to describe the history of political economy and in which Marx's teaching was the object of his libellous attacks.
93 Mercantilism — a school of bourgeois political economy, that emerged in the last third of the fifteenth century; it expressed the interests of the merchant bourgeoisie in the age of the primitive accumulation of capital, identified the wealth of the country with the accumulation of money and attached primary importance in this to the state. Marx called the early period of mercantilism the monetary system (see MECW, Vol. 36).
94 William Petty's Quantulumcunque concerning Money was written in 1682 in the form of an address to Lord Halifax and published in London in 1695. Marx used the 1760 edition.
Petty's The Political Anatomy of Ireland was written in 1672 and published in London in 1691.
95 The reference here is to the French chemist A. L. Lavoisier's "De la richesse territoriale du royaume de France" and "Essai sur la population de la ville de Paris, sur la richesse et ses consommations", as well as the joint work "Essai d'arithmétique politique", written by Lavoisier and the French mathematician Lagrange published in Mélanges d'économie politique. Précédés de notices historiques sur chaque auteur, et accompagnés de commentaires et de notes explicatives, par MM E. Daire et G. de Molinari, Vol. 1, Paris, 1847, pp. 575-620.
96 Engels is referring here to the attempt by John Law, a Scottish economist, to put paper money into circulation in France, where his idea received support in court quarters. In 1716 he founded a private bank, the Banque generale which, in 1718, was reorganised into the state Banque royale. The unlimited issue of bank-notes by Law's bank was accompanied by the withdrawal of coins from circulation. As a result, Stock Exchange speculation reached an unprecedented scale and culminated, in 1720, in the bankruptcy of the bank and of the Law system itself.
97 An inaccuracy in the text: the first edition of Richard Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en général appeared not in 1752, but in 1755, as Marx himself pointed out in Capital, Vol. I (Part VI, Chapter XXI). Adam Smith mentions Cantillon's work in Volume I of his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Chapter VIII, Of the Wages of Labour.
98 In 1866, acting through his adviser Hermann Wagener, Bismarck requested Dühring to draw up a memorandum for the Prussian government on the labour question. Dühring, who advocated harmony between capital and labour, complied with this request. His work was published, however, without his knowledge, first anonymously, and later under the signature of Wagener. This gave Dühring grounds for initiating proceedings against Wagener on a charge of breaking copyright laws. In 1868, Dühring won his case. At the height of this scandalous trial, Dühring published Die Schicksale meiner socialen Denkschrift für das Preussische Staatsministerium.
99 Livre tournois — a French coin named after the town of Tour; from 1740 onwards it was equal to one franc; in 1799, it was replaced by the franc.
100 Engels is referring to the beginning of Chapter I of the "Introduction". He wrote this footnote when Anti-Dühring was published in the newspaper. It remained unchanged in all editions of the book published during Engels' lifetime. In all subsequent separate editions, the first two chapters were joined together under the heading "Introduction". The numbers of the other chapters were not changed, so "Philosophy" now begins with Chapter III.
101 The Reign of Terror — the period of Jacobin revolutionary-democratic dictatorship (June 1793-July 1794), which relied on the revolutionary bloc of the urban petty and middle bourgeoisie, the majority of the peasants and plebeians.
The Directorate — the organ of executive power in France (from November 1795), formed under the 1795 Constitution. Existing until the Napoleon's coup d'état of November 9 (18 Brumaire), 1799 it upheld the interests of big bourgeoisie and brutally suppressed the revolutionary actions of the popular masses.
In 1804, Bonaparte, who actually became the head of the state under the Consulate after 18 Brumaire, was proclaimed Emperor of the French.
102 A reference to the slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" current during the French Revolution.
103 Saint-Simon's first work, Lettres d'un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains was written in Geneva in 1802 and published anonymously in Paris in 1803, without the place and date of publication being indicated. When working on Anti-Dühring, Engels made use of: G. Hubbard, Saint-Simon. Sa vie et ses travaux. Suivi de fragments des plus célèbres écrits de Saint-Simon, Paris, 1857. This edition contains inaccuracies regarding the publication dates of various works by Saint-Simon.
The first most important work of Charles Fourier was Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales, written in the early nineteenth century and published anonymously in Lyons in 1808 (the title page gives Leipzig as the place of publication).
104 The allied armies of the sixth anti-French coalition (Russia, Austria, Britain, Prussia and other countries) entered Paris on March 31, 1814. Napoleon's empire fell and Napoleon himself, after abdicating, was banished to the Island of Elba. The Bourbon monarchy was restored in France for the first time (1814-15).
105 The Hundred Days — the period of brief restoration of the Napoleonic Empire — from the day of Napoleon's return from exile on Elba to Paris on March 20, 1815, until his second abdication on June 22 of the same year, after his army's defeat at Waterloo on June 18, 1815 by Anglo-Dutch forces under Wellington and by the Prussian army under Blücher.
106 After Dühring had been deprived of the right to lecture at Berlin University for criticising university practices and attacking such prominent scientists as Helmholtz, Virchow and others, a just campaign, in the columns of the Social-Democratic press included, grew into an unrestrained apologia for Dühring, owing to the efforts of his supporters. This is what Engels is hinting at. Dühring's attacks on the German Social-Democrats in reactionary newspapers, in the autumn of the same year led, however, to a fall in his authority and influence not only among socialists, but also among people of progressive views in general.
107 This idea had been enunciated in Charles Fourier's first book — Théorie des quatre mouvements — which contains the following general thesis: "Social progress and changes of a period are accompanied by the progress of women towards freedom, while the decay of the social system brings with it a reduction of the freedoms enjoyed by women." Fourier concludes: "Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of all social progress" (Fourier, Oeuvres complètes, t. I, Paris, 1841, pp. 195-96). p. 248
108 In a note to the relevant passage in Socialism Utopian and Scientific, Engels gives the source of the last three quotations: R. Owen, The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race; or, the Coming Change from Irrationality to Rationality, London, 1849, pp. 21, 22. The facts from Owen's biography mentioned above are from the same source.
109 The Bill moved on Owen's initiative in June 1815, was passed by Parliament only in July 1819, having been greatly curtailed. The Act regulating labour in cotton mills banned the employment of children under the age of nine, limited the working day to 12 hours for young people under 18 and established for all workers two breaks, one for breakfast and the other for lunch. with a total duration of one and a half hours.
110 A Congress of Co-operative Societies and Trades Unions, presided over by Owen, was held in London in October 1833. This Congress formally founded the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, the Charter of which was adopted in February 1834. It was Owen's intention that this Union would take over the management of production and remake society peacefully. This utopian plan collapsed very soon. In the face of strong opposition from employers and the state, the Union ceased to exist in 1834.
111 Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaars were founded by workers' co-operatives in various towns of England; the first of these bazaars was founded by Owen in London in September 1832 and existed until mid-1834.
112 The reference is to Proudhon's idea of organising an exchange bank, first put forward in his pamphlet Organisation du Crédit et de la Circulation et Solution du problème sociale, which was published in early April 1848. This idea was developed in detail in his other works. Proudhon's main idea was to replace gold and silver as a means of circulation, with bank-notes, which were, in fact, impersonal bills. These bank-notes of the exchange bank were secured by products of labour and, in this, according to Proudhon, lay their principal difference from other paper money issued by banks and secured by precious metals, landed property, etc.
To put this idea into practice, the Banque du peuple was founded in Paris on January 31, 1849. It went bankrupt, however, and closed in early April 1849.
113 Harmony Hall — the name of the communist community founded by English utopian socialists, led by Owen, at the close of 1839 in Queenwood, Hampshire, England. It existed until 1845.
114 In Socialism Utopian and Scientific, Engels gives a note referring to his work The Mark (see MECW, Vol. 24).
115 This refers to the wars between the major European powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for control of trade with India and America and for seizure of colonial markets. The principal rivals were initially England and Holland, later England and France. England won these wars and, towards the close of the eighteenth century, almost all world trade was concentrated in her hands.
116 The reference is to the Prussian Royal Maritime Company, which was founded as a commercial and banking company in 1772 and granted a number of important privileges by the state. It advanced big loans to the government and, in fact, became its banker and broker.
117 The slogan "a free people's state" — is criticised in section IV of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, Engels' letter to August Bebel of March 18-28, 1875, and Lenin's The State and Revolution, Chapter 1, Paragraph 4, and Chapter IV, Paragraph 3 (Collected Works Vol. 25, pp. 395-401 and 439-42).
118 These figures are from Robert Giffen's paper "Recent Accumulations of Capital in the United Kingdom", read at the Statistical Society on January 15, 1878 and printed in the London Journal of the Statistical Society in March 1878.
119 Speaking about the "German Empire of the Prussian nation", Engels underlines, on the one hand, that the country's unification under Prussian supremacy was completed by Bismarck on a militaristic basis and, on the other, alludes to the name "the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation" which, from the end of the fifteenth century until its formal liquidation in 1806, was part of the archaic state formation, the mediaeval feudal empire, founded in 962 by the German king Otto I and embracing the territory of Germany and several other Central European states. The empire was a precarious unity of feudal principalities and free towns recognising the supreme power of an emperor.
120 Engels had in mind a speech delivered by Bismarck in the Lower Chamber of the Prussian Landtag on March 20, 1852, stating that, if there were another upsurge of the revolutionary movement, large towns, as centres of the revolutionary movement, ought to be wiped out from the face of the earth.
121 The ledger (Kommerzbuch) is described by Wilhelm Weitling in Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit, Section II, Ch. 10, Vivis, 1842. According to Weitling's utopian plan, in the future society, every able-bodied person would have to work a certain number of hours a day and, in return, would receive the necessary means of subsistence. Every person would have the right to work several "commercial hours" over and above this time and, in return, to receive luxury items, different entertainments, theatre and concert tickets, etc. These additional working hours and the products received for them would be recorded in a ledger.
122 Non olet (it {money} does not stink): these words were spoken by the Roman Emperor Vespasian (69-79 A.D.) in reply to his son, who reproached him for introducing a tax on lavatories.
123 Equitable Labour Exchange Bazaars were founded by workers' co-operatives in various towns of England; the first of these bazaars was founded by Owen in London in September 1832 and existed until mid-1834.
124 A detailed criticism of the Lassallean slogan of "full" or unlimited "proceeds of labour" is given in Section 1 of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme.
125 In the original "Zarücker" — from the German zurück (zarück — in Berlin dialect), meaning "retrograde person", "reactionary" ("Rückschrittler", "Reaktionär"). See A. Glassbrenner, Herr Buffe, in der Zarück-Gesellschaft in: Berlin wie es ist und — trinkt, Leipzig, 1848, pp. 14-15.
126 An expression from the resolution written by Prussian King Frederick II on July 22, 1740 in reply to an inquiry from Minister von Brand and President of the Consistory Reichenbach as to whether Catholic schools might be permitted in a Protestant Prussian state.
127 May laws — four laws on creed adopted on Bismarck's initiative in May 1873. These laws established rigid state control over the Catholic Church and were the culmination of Bismarck's so-called drive for culture from 1872 to 1875, which was directed against the Catholic clergy as the mainstay of the "Centre" party, representing the interests of the separatists in South and South-western Germany. Police persecution met with desperate resistance by Catholics and brought them the halo of martyrdom. From the late 1870s, in order to unite all the reactionary forces against the working-class movement, Bismarck's government was compelled first to relax and then to repeal almost all the anti-Catholic laws.
128 The Magic Flute — a Mozart opera with a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. Composed and performed in 1791, it mirrored Masonic ideas; both the author of the libretto and Mozart himself having been Masons.
129 Referendary — Germany a junior official, chiefly a lawyer trained at court or in a state office.