5. State, Family, Education¶
Core Argument¶
Herr Dühring’s future state rests on the “sovereignty of the individual,” a principle that finds its culmination, not its suppression, in majority rule. This sovereignty paradoxically subjects the individual to absolute state compulsion, justified only insofar as it serves natural justice. The state will retain its legislative and judicial apparatus, along with an army, police, and gendarmerie. Religion, however, is to be prohibited outright, as the members of the free society have supposedly outgrown primitive superstition. Engels counters that religion is a fantastic reflection of alien natural and social forces that dominate daily life; it will vanish naturally when society, through the collective ownership of the means of production, brings those forces under conscious control. To outlaw religion, Engels argues, is merely to prolong its life through martyrdom.
On the family, Dühring imagines the modern bourgeois family persisting unchanged, governed by ancient Roman law, with mothers as natural tutors until puberty and fathers thereafter. On education, the universal school will teach mathematics—including calculus in principle—astronomy, mechanics, and physics as the kernel of schooling, alongside descriptive natural history for light conversation. Dead languages are discarded; modern languages are secondary. The core of language study is the grammar of the mother tongue. The latest philosophical principles, particularly Dühring’s own concepts of infinity and the self-equal state of matter, will complete the curriculum.
Engels exposes Dühring’s “people’s school of the future” as merely an “ennobled” Prussian grammar school, replacing Greek and Latin with elementary mathematics and philosophy, while reducing German teaching to a low level. His talk of combining work and instruction is hollow: because the old division of labour remains in his future society, technical training has no practical application and merely replaces gymnastics. Engels contrasts this with Marx’s thesis in Capital that combining productive labour with instruction and gymnastics from a certain age is the only method for producing fully developed human beings.
On marriage and reproduction, Dühring advocates “preventive” and “selective” care at conception and birth to ensure the “best possible composition” of the unborn, while also claiming that passionate, reciprocated love is the best guarantee of a harmonious union. Engels mocks this as contradictory twaddle: a couple with physical defects who love each other would satisfy Dühring’s criteria, rendering his deeper morality meaningless. Dühring’s claim that under existing society prostitution is impossible for women is refuted by the existence of the “petticoat-pension.” Engels concludes his examination of Dühring’s philosophy, economics, and socialism with the final verdict: “mental incompetence due to megalomania.”