Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"
Glossary
A
- Apriorism
- Engels's name for Dühring's philosophical method, examined in Part I: deriving "final truths of the last instance" — about number, space, time, morality — purely from the structure of the human mind rather than from investigation of the actual world. Engels argues this apriorism simply smuggles back in, as supposedly self-evident axioms, conclusions Dühring actually drew from ordinary experience and then forgot he had drawn.
- Related: Herr Duehring, Eternal Truths, The Law of the Definite Number
- Austin Lewis
- The American socialist who abridged and translated this 1907 English edition, titled "Landmarks of Scientific Socialism," condensing and reordering the full German Anti-Dühring rather than rendering it complete — including omitting Part III's first two chapters because they were already available in the standalone pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.
- Related: Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (the Title)
B
- Bourgeois Equality and Eternal Justice
- The Enlightenment promise, examined skeptically in Chapter 3, that superstition, injustice, and privilege would be replaced by "eternal truth, eternal justice, equality founded on natural rights." Engels's verdict, echoing his own later pamphlet, is that this "rule of reason" turned out to be the rule of the bourgeoisie idealized — equality realized in practice as bourgeois legal equality, not substantive social equality.
- Related: Eternal Truths, Modern Socialism
C
- Class Morality
- Engels's counter to Dühring's eternal ethics: as society developed class antagonisms, morality itself split along class lines, each morality either "justifying the interests and domination of the ruling class" or, once a subject class grew strong enough, justifying revolt against that domination. There is no single, timeless moral code standing above this conflict for Engels to appeal to.
- Related: Eternal Truths, The Dialectic
D
- Distribution
- Part II's argument that how a society distributes its product is not a separate, freely chosen ethical question but follows directly from its existing methods of production and exchange — equal distribution under communal tribal ownership, growing inequality as private appropriation and class division develop. Engels uses this to reject Dühring's idea that distribution could simply be redesigned by fiat independent of the underlying economic system.
- Related: The Anarchy of Production, Master and Subject Classes
E
- Eternal Truths
- The fixed, universally valid "final truths" — of morality, justice, natural science — that Dühring claims his system has established for "all possible worlds" and for all time. Engels devotes the Morals and Law chapter to showing that what passes for eternal moral truth actually shifts by class and historical period, becoming feudal, bourgeois, or proletarian morality in turn.
- Related: Apriorism, Class Morality
F
- Freedom as the Recognition of Necessity
- Hegel's formulation, endorsed by Engels in the Morals and Law chapter, that freedom does not mean an imaginary independence from natural laws but consists in understanding those laws well enough to make them serve deliberate human ends — "necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood." Engels uses it to reject Dühring's abstract, will-based notion of moral freedom.
- Related: Class Morality, The Dialectic
H
- Hegel's "Encyclopedia"
- Hegel's own three-part philosophical system — logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of spirit — which Engels invokes in Chapter 4 as the obvious model Dühring's own three-part "final truths" scheme imitates, remarking that he prefers Hegel's system, "fever phantoms" and all, to Dühring's supposedly definitive one.
- Related: Apriorism, Herr Duehring
- Herr Duehring
- Eugen Dühring, the Berlin lecturer whose sweeping, self-styled "philosophy of reality" — covering metaphysics, natural science, economics, and socialism — is the polemical target of the entire book. Engels answers him point by point across all three parts, treating his claim to have single-handedly refounded every field of knowledge as symptomatic of a broader German mania for instant, closed "systems."
- Related: Apriorism, The Force Theory, The Economic Commune
L
- Landmarks of Scientific Socialism (the Title)
- The name Austin Lewis gave his 1907 abridged English translation of Anti-Dühring, reflecting his framing of the book not as a period polemic against a now-obscure rival but as a durable statement of Marxist philosophy, economics, and socialism — the title under which this platform presents the text.
- Related: Austin Lewis
M
- Master and Subject Classes
- Engels's alternative account, against Dühring's force theory, of how ruling and ruled classes actually originated: not through one man conquering another by the sword, but through communal offices (managing common affairs, exchange with outside tribes) gradually hardening into permanent positions of economic advantage as production and commodity exchange developed within and between tribes.
- Related: The Force Theory, Surplus Value and Simple/Compound Labor
- Modern Socialism
- Chapter 3's opening definition: socialism as the theoretical product of two real conditions of nineteenth-century society — the class antagonism between property owners and the propertyless, and the anarchy prevailing in production — rather than a free-floating moral ideal descended from Enlightenment reason alone, though Engels traces its intellectual ancestry to the eighteenth-century French philosophers as well.
- Related: The Anarchy of Production, Scientific Socialism
Q
- Quantity into Quality
- One of Engels's three dialectical laws: gradual, purely quantitative changes accumulate until they trigger a sudden qualitative leap — water heated degree by degree eventually boils, cooled degree by degree eventually freezes. Chapter 7 opens Engels's dialectics chapter by using this law to answer Dühring's flat denial that contradiction can exist in real things.
- Related: The Dialectic, The Negation of the Negation
S
- Scientific Socialism
- Part III's positive argument, later lifted almost wholesale into the pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific: that socialism follows necessarily from analyzing capitalism's actual contradiction — socialized production against private, individual appropriation — rather than from a moral blueprint of an ideal society invented independent of economic conditions.
- Related: The Anarchy of Production, Master and Subject Classes
- Surplus Value and Simple/Compound Labor
- The economic core Engels borrows from Marx to answer Dühring's force theory: value is created by socially necessary labor-time, and skilled ("compound") labor counts economically as a multiple of simple, unskilled labor. On this basis Engels explains capitalist profit as unpaid surplus labor extracted from workers, not a natural return to capital or a product of superior force.
- Related: The Force Theory, Master and Subject Classes
T
- The "Philosophy of Reality"
- Dühring's own name for his system, which he presented as breaking entirely with prior speculative philosophy in favor of hard, empirical "reality" — an irony Engels exploits throughout Part I by showing how much of Dühring's supposedly reality-grounded system is actually apriorist deduction dressed up as fact.
- Related: Apriorism, Herr Duehring
- The Anarchy of Production
- Chapter 3's diagnosis of modern capitalism: production has become genuinely social — carried out by masses of cooperating workers inside factories — while appropriation of the product remains private and uncoordinated, so that "anarchy" reigns between individual producers competing without any overall plan. Engels treats this contradiction, not force or bad intentions, as the actual root of capitalist crisis and exploitation.
- Related: Scientific Socialism, Distribution
- The Dialectic
- Part I's culminating argument, laid out through three linked laws: the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. Engels's case is that real development in nature, history, and thought happens through contradiction and qualitative leaps, not through the flat, static, mutually exclusive categories Dühring's "philosophy of reality" relies on.
- Related: Quantity into Quality, The Negation of the Negation, Herr Duehring
- The Economic Commune
- Dühring's own positive replacement for capitalism's "robber system" — a scheme of value based on labor-time that Engels dryly observes is structurally identical to the "negation of the negation" Dühring elsewhere denounces as mystical nonsense. Later, in Part III, Engels argues Dühring's economic communes would actually resurrect finance capital under a new name rather than abolish exploitation.
- Related: The Negation of the Negation, Herr Duehring
- The Force Theory
- Dühring's claim, refuted at length in Part II, that political power and force — not economic relations — are the primary cause of exploitation and class society: Robinson enslaving Friday by the sword, not economics. Engels answers that force is itself a product of prior economic development, tracing the origin of master and subject classes to divisions of labor and communal offices that predate any "conqueror."
- Related: Herr Duehring, Master and Subject Classes
- The Law of the Definite Number
- One of Dühring's a priori "final truths" about the natural universe: that any accumulation of identical objects — including, ultimately, all matter in existence — must be thinkable only as a definite, countable number, which Dühring uses to argue for a finite universe and (implicitly) a first cause. Engels ridicules this as smuggling theology back in through supposedly pure logic.
- Related: Apriorism, Herr Duehring
- The Negation of the Negation
- Engels's illustration, borrowed from Hegel, using a grain of barley: planted in soil, the grain (thesis) is negated as it germinates into a plant, which is in turn negated (a second negation, not a simple return) when the plant produces many new grains — "equality on a higher plane" rather than a circle back to the start. Engels mockingly notes that Dühring's own positive program, the "economic commune," quietly reproduces this exact structure while its author denounces the dialectic that names it.
- Related: Quantity into Quality, The Economic Commune, The Dialectic
V
- Volkstaat
- The central organ of the German Social Democratic Party in the 1870s, in whose pages Engels originally serialized his critique of Dühring at the urging of party comrades worried that Dühring's rival system would sow "division and confusion" in a still-young, recently unified socialist movement.
- Related: Herr Duehring