This little book was not planned as a book. In 1877 and 1878 Engels spent the best part of a year answering Eugen Duehring, a Berlin lecturer who had announced his conversion to socialism and presented the German public with a whole new system. The reply ran to a fat volume of philosophy, economics and natural science - Anti-Duehring. Then, as Engels tells the story in the introduction printed here, "At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue ... I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880." That accident of publishing produced the most widely read socialist pamphlet of the nineteenth century. Its three chapters do what no other short text in the tradition does: they set out the case for socialism historically rather than morally. The utopians - Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen - are not mocked but honoured and then explained, as men of genius who appeared before the material conditions existed for the thing they imagined, and who therefore had to invent it out of their heads. Against them Engels sets a socialism that claims to be discovered rather than designed, arising from the contradiction the capitalist mode of production develops between socialised production and private appropriation. The best part of the book is the last thing Engels added to it. The Special Introduction to the English edition of 1892, written in English in London and dated 20 April that year, is his final substantial piece on the history of ideas: a wry, worldly account of why materialism came to England as "the shamefaced materialism" of the respectable classes, and of the long English compromise between the bourgeoisie and religion. Progress Publishers, Selected Works Volume Three, following the authorised English edition of 1892, with the texts rechecked against the originals in the Institute. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
