Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a short book published in 1880 by Friedrich Engels. It was drawn mainly from a longer polemical work, Anti-Dühring, from which Engels selected and rearranged three chapters. Its purpose was to popularize Marxist ideas among working-class readers. Engels had recognised years earlier, in a letter to Marx in 1868, that the dense prose of Das Kapital needed a popular version. The work first appeared in French, translated by Paul Lafargue, and enjoyed wide circulation. It became one of the fundamental publications of the international socialist movement between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book distinguishes between two kinds of socialism. Utopian socialism, represented by thinkers such as Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, rests on moral ideals and an eternal notion of justice that its authors wished to impose on society according to their personal opinions. Scientific socialism, by contrast, is grounded in the analysis of material reality. Engels argues that the ultimate causes of social change and political revolution are to be sought in transformations of the modes of production and exchange, not in the philosophy of each age. Hence his defence of the materialist conception of history.

The exposition also traces the history of dialectics, from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, and devotes its final chapter to applying the materialist method to the evolution of society. Engels summarises the three phases Marx describes in Capital: medieval society, the capitalist revolution and the proletarian revolution. He concludes that capitalism, through its own contradictions, gives way naturally to communism. The text thus presents itself as a passage from utopia to social science.

Its reception was immense. It was translated into many languages, among them German, Italian, Russian, Polish and Spanish, and circulated widely in popular editions. In the preface to the English edition of 1892, Engels noted that few socialist works had been translated so often. Its influence in shaping readers of Marxism, particularly in Russia and Germany, was considerable.