2. What Herr Dühring promises¶
Core Argument¶
Engels opens his polemic by establishing the sheer audacity of Herr Dühring’s self-presentation. The chapter’s core argument is that Dühring is no ordinary philosopher or socialist, but a figure who claims infallibility, presenting his work as “final and ultimate truth” and himself as the only true philosopher of his age and the foreseeable future. Engels demonstrates this through a dense anthology of Dühring’s own self-glorifications, drawn from his Cursus der Philosophie, Cursus der National- und Sozialökonomie, and Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus. Dühring’s philosophy is styled a “natural system” or “philosophy of reality,” which supposedly excludes any subjective limitation and establishes the “basic forms of being” without detracting from profundity. His economic and political works are said to have brought about “creative turns,” culminating in a socialist plan for the future that is the “practical fruit of a clear theory” and consequently infallible. Engels’s method is to let Dühring’s own bombast condemn him, noting that such a claim to exclusive truth forces a stark choice: either Dühring is the greatest genius of all time, or he is wrong, and any benevolent consideration would be an insult.
Having established Dühring’s pretensions, Engels turns to his polemics against predecessors, which are characterised by extreme disdain. Dühring dismisses Leibniz as a “court-philosophiser,” tolerates Kant only barely, and condemns Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel as purveyors of “monstrous caricatures” and “delirious fantasies,” with Hegel’s work dismissed as a “pestilence.” Among natural scientists, Darwin is singled out for “semi-poetry” and “brutality directed against humanity.” But the socialists fare worst. The utopians are derided as “social alchemists”: Saint-Simon is charged with religious mania, Fourier is called an “idiot” and his phalanstery a “caricature,” and Owen is dismissed for “feeble and paltry ideas.” Dühring even indulges in crude wordplay, reducing Saint-Simon to “saint,” Fourier to fou (crazy), and Enfantin to enfant (childish). Later socialists are treated no better: Lassalle is a “Jewish hero” guilty of “pompous display of the most paltry trifles,” while Marx is accused of “narrowness of conception,” “deformity of thought and style,” and “philosophical and scientific backwardness.” Engels’s polemical thrust is to expose Dühring’s abuse as the necessary corollary of his claim to infallibility: if Dühring is the sole repository of truth, then all others must be worthless. The chapter thus sets the stage for a systematic critique, warning the reader that they are dealing not with a modest contributor to socialist literature, but with a dogmatist whose “deep-rootedness” must be examined at closer quarters.