Socialism Utopian And Scientific

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is one of the most important books on socialism, first published in 1880 by German-born socialist Friedrich Engels. The work was primarily extracted from a longer polemic work published in 1876. It is still an important source of information on socialism.

2020 Reprint of the 1892 Edition. This short work was intended by Engels to be a primer on Marxian thought and especially on the distinction between utopian socialism and scientific socialism. Engels maintains that it was the latter that Marxism considers itself to embody. The book explains that whereas utopian socialism is idealistic, reflecting the personal opinions of the authors and claims that society can be adapted based on these opinions, scientific socialism derives itself from reality. It focuses on Marx's materialist conception of history, which concludes that communism naturally follows capitalism. Engels begins the book by chronicling the thought of utopian socialists, starting with Saint-Simon. He then proceeds to Fourier and Robert Owen. In Chapter Two, he summarizes dialectics, and then chronicles its evolution from from the ancient Greeks to Hegel. Chapter Three summarizes dialectics in relation to economic and social struggles, essentially echoing the words of Marx. In his biography of Marx, Isaiah Berlin described Engel's book as "the best brief autobiographical appreciation of Marxism by one of its creators" and considered that, "written in Engels's best vein", it "had 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]

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific is a political science classic that needs no preface. It ranks with the Communist Manifesto as one of the indispensable books for any one desiring to understand the modern socialist movement. It has been translated into every language where capitalism prevails, and its circulation is more rapid than ever before. The book explains the differences between utopian socialism and scientific socialism, which Marxism considers itself to embody. The book explains that whereas utopian socialism is idealist, reflects the personal opinions of the authors and claims that society can be adapted based on these opinions, scientific socialism derives itself from reality. It focuses on the materialist conception of history, which is based on an analysis over history, and concludes that communism naturally follows capitalism. Engels begins the book by chronicaling the thought of utopian socialists, starting with Saint-Simon. He then proceeds to Fourier and Robert Owen. In Chapter Two, he summarizes dialectics, and then chronicles the thought from the ancient Greeks to Hegel. Chapter Three summarizes dialectics in relation to economic and social struggles, essentially echoing the words of Marx

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific needs no preface. It ranks with the Communist Manifesto as one of the indispensable books for any one desiring to understand the modern socialist movement. It has been translated into every language where capitalism prevails, and its circulation is more rapid than ever before.

Among the best explainations of Marxism made by Marx and Engels, Engels wrote this pamphlet from portions of Anti-Duhring, with the intention of providing workers with a straight-forward exposition to Marxist thought. In the three sections of the pamphlet, Engels' explains the three components of Marxist thought: French Socialism, German Philosophy, and English Economics. In the first part of the pamphlet Engels explains that Socialism of the past had been utopian - holding the belief that as soon as everyone in a society understood Socialism and believed in it, a Socialist society would appear. Engels wrote, ..". the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these were the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments." Engels then explains the slow historical development of the dialectical philosophy over thousands of years; knowledge that culminated into what allowed Marx to see and explain the materialist conception of history, which Engels goes onto explain in the third part of this pamphlet.

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