Engels traces Marxism's philosophical bloodline — Hegel's dialectic, Feuerbach's materialism, and the historical materialism Marx built from both.

Feuerbach: The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy

Friedrich Engels · 1888

Written in Engels's sixties as a review of a minor book on Feuerbach, this short 1886 essay is his own account of where Marxism's ideas actually came from — not the economics of Capital or the politics of the Manifesto, but the philosophical break that made both possible. In four tight sections he shows how Hegel's dialectic survived the collapse of Hegel's system, how Feuerbach's materialism corrected Hegel but stalled on an abstract "Man" detached from history, and how Marx's decisive move was to fuse the dialectic with materialism and aim it at real, changing social and economic conditions. The appendix prints, for the first time, Marx's own eleven "Theses on Feuerbach" from 1845 — ending with the line that arguably sums up the entire Marxist project: philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is to change it.

6 chapters · 17,633 words · ~80 min read