Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

As the title suggests, Part 2 is largely concerned with exploring the dialectical method. Dialectics seek to uncover the truth through a discourse between two or more people holding different viewpoints. Engels begins by presenting Classical Greek dialecticians like Aristotle and Heraclitus. He also describes the dialectical method’s evolution in later work by French and English dialecticians. However, most French philosophers shaping socialist thought were far more concerned with metaphysics than dialectics. Metaphysics is a broad branch of philosophy, but for Engels’s purposes he discusses it to highlight metaphysics’ tendency to apply fixed descriptions to things and ideas in isolation, without acknowledging fluidity or the capacity for a thing to be two or more things at once.

Engels criticizes metaphysics as rigid, narrow, and overly reliant on binaries: “In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees” (55). He poses dialectics as an alternative to metaphysics: “Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending” (56).

Engels introduces Hegel as another key influence on scientific socialism. Like the utopians in the prior section, Engels highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the Hegelian system. He defines the Hegelian system as such: “In [Hegel’s] system—and herein is its great merit—for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process—i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development” (56). To Engels, Hegel’s system is ingenious, but it is limited by his imperfect knowledge pool: Hegel couldn’t know everything, and much of what he did “know” was out of date by Engels’s time. He also disagreed with Hegel’s preference for idealism over materialism.

Nevertheless, by portraying nature and society as a process, the Hegelian system speaks to Engels’s view of socialism. Under old models, history was deemed to be all “irrationality and violence,” compared to the present where idealists strive for utopian perfection. Instead, Engels’s model sees the entirety of history as the “history of class struggles,” which persist to this day. With this revelation, socialism can no longer be thought of as a method of perfecting society, as the utopians believe. Rather, socialism must be seen as a scientific examination of social and economic evolution throughout history for the purpose of ending the class struggles that have defined all previous centuries.

Engels posits that organizing socialism around modern materialism transitions it away from utopianism and into a rational method of truth-seeking. Engels ends the section by praising Marx’s “two great discoveries”—historical materialism and surplus-value—which he says have transformed socialism into a science.