Eugen Dühring, a prominent academic, challenged the revolutionary socialist ideas of Marxism that dominated the SPD at that time. Some made the mistake of thinking that capitalism might gradually and naturally slide towards socialism because of this intervention. The SPD was being brutally repressed by the German state, which had been forced by severe economic depression and a tumultuous mass movement to intervene in the economy, to a degree. The book developed out of a battle for the soul of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), then a new party growing rapidly in the 1870s and 1880s. Like the Manifesto, it was written as part of a living struggle of ideas. Despite the dated language, it is still one of the greatest and clearest explanations of what socialism is and why it is necessary. He declared that it had outsold even the Communist Manifesto when it was published in 1880. In a further article in our series marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels, Ross Saunders looks at one of Engels’ best-known works, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’.Įngels was very proud of his book ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’.
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