Engels wrote this book to settle a debt, and he was forty years late paying it. In 1845 he and Marx had shut themselves up in Brussels to write out, at length, what separated them from the German philosophy they had grown up in. The manuscript never found a printer; they left it, as Marx put it later and Engels quotes here, "to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose—self-clarification." Four decades passed. Marx died. Neither of them had ever gone back to Ludwig Feuerbach, the man who, Engels says, "more than any other post-Hegelian philosopher, had upon us during our period of storm and stress" an influence that it was "an undischarged debt of honour" to acknowledge. Then the editors of Die Neue Zeit, the German party's theoretical journal, asked him for a review of a new book on Feuerbach by the Danish philosopher C. N. Starcke. Engels took the commission and wrote something much larger than a review: a short history of how one world outlook came out of another. It appeared in the fourth and fifth numbers of the journal for 1886 and, revised, as a separate publication in Stuttgart in 1888, with the foreword dated London, February 21 of that year.
The book is short, it is written at speed, and it does the work of a much longer one. In four chapters Engels sets out what Hegel's system contained that was worth keeping and what had to be thrown away; states what he calls the great basic question of philosophy and why the answers to it divide philosophers into camps; takes Feuerbach's materialism apart, with particular attention to his ethics; and then sketches, in twenty pages, the materialist conception of history. That last chapter is the reason the book outlived its occasion. Starcke is forgotten. Feuerbach is read mostly by specialists. The account of how ideas about law, politics and religion arise on an economic basis, and then acquire a life of their own, is still being argued about.
The text printed here is the one prepared in Moscow for the Selected Works in three volumes of Marx and Engels, Volume 3 (Progress Publishers, first printing 1970, second printing 1973), pages 335 to 376. It is a Progress translation; the edition names no translator, giving only "Translated from the German" at the foot of the work, as it does throughout the volume. With it come the notes of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — eleven of its own, numbered 190 to 200, and five more first attached to earlier works in the volume and cited again here. The Institute's reference marks appear in this edition as bracketed numerals; Engels's own footnotes, and the editors' page-bottom glosses signed "—Ed.", are kept where the edition puts them.
One thing the edition does not print deserves recording at the outset, because a reader would otherwise never know it was missing. In the foreword Engels explains that he went back to the 1845 manuscript, found the section on Feuerbach unfinished and unusable, and then found something better: "in an old notebook of Marx's I have found the eleven theses on Feuerbach printed here as an appendix. These are notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook." They are not printed here as an appendix. In place of them the edition sets an editors' footnote directing the reader to another volume — "Ibid., pp. 13-15." A companion footnote sends him to Volume 1, pages 16 to 80, for the unfinished manuscript. The pamphlet Engels published had a beginning, a body and an end; the Selected Works keeps the first two and files the third somewhere else. We will come back to this, because it turns out to be more than a housekeeping decision.
Take the strengths first, and they are considerable. The best thing in the book is its treatment of Hegel, which is neither a demolition nor a rescue but a separation of the method from the system. Engels shows how a philosophy that had been received as the official creed of the Prussian state — "the terminating system of the whole development—the Hegelian system—was even raised, as it were, to the rank of a royal Prussian philosophy of state!" — contained a principle that dissolved every such creed, including its own. Hegel's notorious sentence that everything real is rational was read by Frederick William III's subjects as "a philosophical benediction bestowed upon despotism, police government, Star Chamber proceedings and censorship." Engels shows that on Hegel's own definitions it converts into its opposite: what has ceased to be necessary has ceased to be real, and so "All that exists deserves to perish." From this he draws the passage that is the finest thing he ever wrote about method:
Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honoured institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy] nothing is final, absolute, sacred.
The second strength is the account of where philosophical problems come from. Engels does not treat the question of spirit and nature as a puzzle that fell out of the sky; he traces it to men who did not know how their own bodies worked, who dreamed of the dead and concluded that something in them was separable from the body. The "great basic question of all philosophy," he says, is "that concerning the relation of thinking and being," and it grew out of that. This is a genuinely historical way of handling a metaphysical dispute, and it is done without sneering.
Third, there is the demolition of Feuerbach's ethics, which is funny and merciless and has lost none of its edge. Feuerbach founded morality on the urge towards happiness, tempered by respect for the same urge in others. Engels observes that on this basis "the Stock Exchange is the highest temple of moral conduct, provided only that one always speculates right," and follows the logic through: the man who loses has merely calculated badly, his ruin is the punishment for his own unethical arithmetic, and the winner may "slap my chest proudly, like a modern Rhadamanthus." The conclusion is the sting: "Feuerbach's morality is cut exactly to the pattern of modern capitalist society, little as Feuerbach himself might desire or imagine it." Anyone who has sat through a lecture on enlightened self-interest knows that this reply is still needed.
Fourth, and most durable, the chapter on history. Engels's problem is that men act for reasons they can state, and history produces results nobody intended. His answer is to look for "the driving powers which—consciously or unconsciously, and indeed very often unconsciously—lie behind the motives of men who act in history," and to look for them not in individuals but in what "set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of the people in each people." The state gets a page that is worth the whole essay: it "presents itself to us as the first ideological power over man," an organ society creates for its common interests which, "hardly come into being," makes itself independent of society, and the more completely as it becomes the organ of one class.
The weaknesses are real, and two of them matter for what came afterwards. The first is the treatment of Feuerbach himself, which is thinner than the occasion required. Engels admits in the foreword that the finished part of the 1845 manuscript "contains no criticism of Feuerbach's doctrine itself." What we get instead is a verdict — Feuerbach "stopped halfway, was a materialist below and an idealist above" — that is true as far as it goes and does not much engage with what Feuerbach actually argued. The book Engels was reviewing gets a similarly brisk hearing.
The second is more serious. Engels divides philosophers into "two great camps" according to whether they take spirit or nature as primary, and he is careful about it. He says twice that the words idealism and materialism "originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense," and warns explicitly of "what confusion arises when some other meaning is put into them." He was right to worry. A distinction offered as a way of sorting historical positions is easily converted into a test of allegiance, and a test of allegiance is easily converted into an instrument. Engels supplied the distinction and the warning in the same paragraph. His successors kept the distinction.
Which brings us to the question this edition does not put to itself. Was the state that reprinted this book consistent with it?
The book ends philosophy. That is its argument, stated flatly: the materialist conception of history "puts an end to philosophy in the realm of history, just as the dialectical conception of nature makes all natural philosophy both unnecessary and impossible," and what remains to philosophy is only "the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics." It is not a call for a better philosophy. It is a notice that the discipline has been overtaken by the sciences and by history, and that inventing connections in the head is no longer a respectable way to spend a career.
In the Soviet Union this text became the foundation document of a compulsory academic subject. The "basic question" and the "two camps" were taught as the framework of dialectical materialism to every student in the country; the answer was known before the question was put; and the examinations had right answers. That would be irony enough. But it went further than teaching. In January 1931 the Party's Central Committee settled a dispute between rival schools of Soviet philosophers by resolution, condemning the group around Abram Deborin as "Menshevising idealism" — a philosophical verdict handed down by a political body, with consequences for the careers and eventually the lives of the losers. In 1947 Andrei Zhdanov intervened in the same way in a discussion of a history of philosophy, laying down what the history of philosophy was to be. Engels had written that the philosophers' answers "split them into two great camps." He did not envisage a state that would decide which camp you were in, and act on the decision.
The Institute's own note on this work, note 190, shows how the conversion was made. It is not really a note; it is a four-hundred-word essay attached to the title, telling the reader what the book proves before he has read a line of it. Two of its sentences are worth setting out. "The way a philosopher approaches the fundamental issue of philosophy determines his allegiance to one or the other philosophical camp." And: "Much credit is due to Engels for his substantiation of the partisan principle of philosophy" — partiinost, party-mindedness, the doctrine that philosophy has a party line — closing with the judgement that "This work of Engels's is a model of proletarian commitment and principled philosophical thinking." Engels's careful, twice-repeated warning against putting other meanings into the words has been turned inside out. The camps are no longer a description of a historical division; they are an allegiance, and the allegiance is assessed.
And now the missing appendix reads differently. The eleven theses Marx scribbled in 1845 are the most concentrated statement in the whole tradition of the priority of practice over contemplation: that the truth of thinking is settled in activity, not in argument; that the educator himself has to be educated; and, in the last of them, that interpreting the world is not the point. Engels put them at the end of the pamphlet deliberately, as its conclusion and its warrant. An edition that removes them and leaves a cross-reference is not censoring anything — the theses are in Volume 1, and the note says so. It is doing something quieter. It is taking a work whose argument is that philosophy has ended in practice, and returning it to the shelf as philosophy: chapters one to four, notes, no appendix, no instruction to go and change anything. Nothing has been cut. The architecture has simply been rearranged so that the building no longer points anywhere.
Why it turned out this way is a question about circumstances before it is a question about doctrine. A revolution isolated in a poor country, its working class destroyed in a civil war fought under foreign invasion, threw up an administrative caste that had every reason to want a doctrine incapable of being turned back on itself — and every reason to keep the founders in print, since their authority was the only warrant it had. So the sentences went on being set in type, in millions of copies, in every language the state could reach. That is the standing refutation of the use they were put to. A regime that had genuinely superseded Engels would not have needed to keep quoting him.
So what is this Marxism worth now? Its central move is a habit of mind rather than a doctrine, and the habit is in short supply: when an idea presents itself as obvious, ask what interest finds it obvious, and when it became so. That is not cynicism about ideas — Engels is emphatic that a philosophy can drive a movement, that "everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds," and that the form it takes there matters. It is a refusal to take the self-description of an age at face value. His demolition of an ethics built on mutual self-interest is still the best short reply to the moral economy of the market, and it lands harder now than it did in 1886. His account of the state as an organ that separates itself from the society that made it is more useful to a socialist than most of what has been written on the subject since, and it is not a comfortable thought for anybody, in any system. And the sentence to carry away is the one about dialectical philosophy: for it "nothing is final, absolute, sacred." It was printed for seventy years by a state that had made a great many things sacred and final, and the printing was its own quiet indictment. Engels closed by saying that the German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy. The inheritance was diverted for a long time into a Ministry and a syllabus. It has not been extinguished, and this small book is still the shortest route back to it.