This is the book that founded a world outlook, and its author did not want to write it. Engels says so in the first sentence of the first preface: "The following work is by no means the fruit of any 'inner urge'. On the contrary." Three years earlier Eugen Dühring, a lecturer at Berlin University who had gone blind as a young man and who wrote at enormous speed on everything, had announced himself a socialist — and not merely a socialist but the author of a complete new system covering philosophy, political economy and the shape of the society to come. In the German party this went down well. The party was new: the Eisenachers, who looked to Marx, and the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, who did not, had merged at Gotha in 1875 on terms Marx thought a capitulation. Its recruits were mostly young. Dühring's confidence, his hostility to the Berlin professors and his readiness to supply a plan for the future won over Johann Most, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, the young Eduard Bernstein, and for a while August Bebel. Wilhelm Liebknecht wrote to Engels twice in 1875 asking him to deal with it, and other friends kept up the pressure. Engels gave in. "Nevertheless it was a year before I could make up my mind to neglect other work and get my teeth into this sour apple. It was the kind of apple that, once bitten into, had to be completely devoured; and it was not only very sour, but also very large."
He wrote for two years, from May 1876 to July 1878. The book came out first as a serial in Vorwärts, the party's paper, and it came out against resistance: Dühring's supporters tried at the party congress in Gotha in May 1877 to stop the central organ printing it, and although they failed, much of the book appeared thereafter in the paper's scientific supplement rather than in the paper proper, at long intervals. Marx was closely involved. "I read the whole manuscript to him before it was printed, and the tenth chapter of the part on economics ('From Kritische Geschichte') was written by Marx but unfortunately had to be shortened somewhat by me for purely external reasons." What came out of this reluctant, obstructed, jointly-supervised polemic was the first connected statement of the whole Marxist position that either founder ever made — and, in the three chapters Engels later lifted out as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, one of the most widely read socialist pamphlets of the century.
The text here is the one prepared in Moscow for the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume 25 (1987), printed from the third German edition of 1894 and translated by Emile Burns, whom the volume names on a page of its own. With it come the 129 notes of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the page-bottom notes — some Engels's own, most the translator's, giving the German where the English cannot carry it. Reference marks in the text appear here as [Note 1], [a] and so on, so that they are not confused with the page numbers of Dühring's own books, which the edition also sets in square brackets.
Begin with what the book does well, and the first thing is an accident of form. Because Dühring had built a system, Engels had to answer across the whole of it, and so was forced to say positively what his own outlook held about nature, about knowledge, about morals, about the state, about value and about the future. Nobody had asked Marx or Engels to do that before. The result is uneven, but at its best it is very good indeed.
It is best on the historical character of truth. Dühring dealt in "final and ultimate truths"; Engels's reply is that a system claiming to be finished contradicts the method it claims to use: "A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental laws of dialectic reasoning." The same argument, turned on morals, produces the strongest pages in Part I. There have been three moral codes in modern Europe, Engels observes — Christian-feudal, bourgeois, proletarian — and each belongs to the economic order that produced it. "We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and for ever immutable ethical law on the pretext that the moral world, too, has its permanent principles which stand above history." That is not relativism. Engels holds that there has been progress in morality as in everything else, and that the endpoint is real: "A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life."
It is best, too, on force. Dühring derived property and class from violence; Engels sets against him the schoolroom picture Dühring himself had used, of Crusoe enslaving Friday, and asks what the enslavement is for. Friday is made to work more than he needs for his own keep, and the surplus is the point: the childish example "proves that force is only the means, and that the aim, on the contrary, is economic advantage." That answer has not been improved upon. Nor has the chapter on freedom, which takes Hegel's formula and gives it a use: "Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends."
The weaknesses are equally plain, and they are mostly in Part I's chapters on nature. Engels was careful about what he was claiming — "there could be no question of building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and evolving them from it" — but the illustrations he chose do not carry the weight later placed on them. A barley grain that germinates and yields many grains is offered as the negation of the negation; the homologous series of alcohols is offered as quantity turning into quality. Read as examples of a way of thinking, these are suggestive. Read as proofs of laws governing everything from chemistry to history, they are thin, and they invite exactly the master-key use of dialectics that Engels was warning against. He was also honest about the book's shelf life. By 1885 he thought readers would take "the polemic against the Dühring tenets merely for the sake of the positive conceptions developed alongside this polemic, in spite of the fact that the latter has now largely lost its point."
The deeper gap is in Part III, and it is the gap that matters most for what happened afterwards. Engels's account of the transition is famous and it is compressed almost to a slogan. "The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state." Then: "a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary … State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It dies out." Every clause of that is an assertion about an outcome. There is nothing here about how the transitional state is composed, who staffs it, how its officers are chosen and removed, or by what test one could tell a state that is dying out from one that is settling in. Marx had answered those questions concretely seven years earlier in The Civil War in France — elected officials subject to recall at any time, paid workmen's wages, no standing army, no separate bureaucracy — and Engels knew it. In Anti-Dühring the institutions drop out and only the tendency remains. A tendency cannot be audited.
Which brings us to the question this edition does not put to itself. No other book of Engels's was so thoroughly turned into state property. Part I supplied the raw material for what the Soviet Union taught as "dialectical and historical materialism", the compulsory philosophical curriculum of a great power. The evidence is on this publisher's own list. Open V. Boguslavsky's ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Progress, 1978), or A. F. Sheptulin's Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (1978), or F. Konstantinov's The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy (1979), and the footnotes run "F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 60", "p. 109", "p. 141", page after page. These books are the reason the work was reprinted; they are also what the work was made to become.
The irony is not subtle, and it is worth spelling out because the apparatus will not. The ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism quotes Engels's line that an all-embracing and final system contradicts dialectical reasoning — and it quotes it inside a textbook that is itself all-embracing and final, examinable, and not open to revision by its readers. The Institute's own preface to this volume charges Dühring with having "claimed to have created a new all-embracing system of philosophy, political economy and socialism". That is a fair description of Dühring. It is also a fair description of what was built on the book that answered him. And the maxim Engels borrowed from Spinoza to close an argument — Ignorantia non est argumentum, "Ignorance is no argument" — reads differently in a country where philosophy faculties had been used to settle questions in genetics, in physics and in cybernetics, and where the argument from ignorance had been backed by the state.
On the state itself the divergence is total. "The state is not 'abolished'. It dies out." That sentence was printed in Moscow throughout the years in which the state grew without interruption: the constitution of 1936, which declared socialism achieved while the security apparatus reached its height; the doctrine that the state must be strengthened as socialism advances; and the Party Programme of 1961, which retired the dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of a "state of the whole people". Trotsky had made the point in 1936 in The Revolution Betrayed, quoting Lenin on the proletariat needing "only a dying state" and observing that the criticism "now attacks with redoubled force the Soviet idolators with their cult of a bureaucratic state which has not the slightest intention of 'dying away'."
Credit where it is due, because the volume earns some. It prints Engels's three prefaces entire, including the admission that the polemic has dated. It prints the work from the 1894 text. Its translator's notes are meticulous, down to recording that where Marx's manuscript of the tenth chapter wrote Confucius, the German printed edition has the homophone Confusius, "confuser". And its note on the slogan "a free people's state" — note 117, attached to the very passage on the dying-out of the state — sends the reader to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, to Engels's letter to Bebel of March 1875, and to Lenin's The State and Revolution. That is a genuinely useful note, and it is also the exact place where the obvious question is not asked. There are 129 notes here. They are scrupulous about the 1870s and silent about the 1930s. The erasure is not done by cutting anything; it is done by not asking.
Why it turned out so is a question about circumstances before it is a question about doctrine. A revolution in a poor and largely peasant country, isolated when the German revolution failed, its working class scattered and killed in a civil war fought under foreign intervention, had no material basis on which any state could begin to wither; the emergency lasted long enough to harden into a structure, and the administrative caste that rose out of the scarcity made its position permanent and then required the founders to agree with it. The proof that they never did is that these sentences went on being printed, in millions of copies, in the languages of the world. A regime that had really superseded Engels would not have needed him.
So what is this Marxism worth now? Its permanent target was never Dühring, who is forgotten, but the type Dühring belongs to: the confident, complete system that has an answer for everything and treats revision as heresy. That type did not die with the nineteenth century, and Anti-Dühring remains the best short inoculation against it — including, awkwardly for its custodians, against the version of itself. Its account of morality as historical without being arbitrary is still the most useful thing a socialist can say when told that some arrangement is simply human nature. Its account of force as means and economic advantage as end is still the standard reply to explanations of politics that stop at violence or at will. Its description of the anarchy of production — the "increasing organisation of production, upon a social basis" inside each firm, and none at all between them — remains the sharpest statement of why a system that plans brilliantly in detail lurches blindly in the aggregate. And the sentence on freedom is the one to keep: knowledge of necessity is not submission to it but the power of "systematically making them work towards definite ends". Engels called the transition "humanity's leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom". The state that canonised the phrase never took the leap. The book that supplies the phrase also supplies the standard by which that failure can be judged, which is why it is still worth reading, and why it was never safe.