Though a small minority among this milieu attempted to rescue Engels’s and V.

Engels’s contribution to Marxism became a focal point in the ensuing debate. 3 When a New Left emerged in response to Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the Russian invasion of Hungary, and the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, it attempted to renew socialism through a critical reassessment of Marxism.

While the claim that Engels distorted Marx’s ideas has roots going back to the nineteenth century, 1956 was a pivotal moment after which it increasingly became a dominant theme within the secondary literature. Over the course of the twentieth century, a growing number of commentators have claimed that Engels fundamentally distorted Marx’s thought, and that “Marxism” and especially Stalinism emerged out of this one-sided caricature of Marx’s ideas. 1 But if this context has been unpropitious for Marxism generally, criticisms of Engels’s thought have a second, quite separate, source. Despite the recent global economic crisis and associated increases in inequality that have tended to confirm Karl Marx and Engels’s general critique of capitalism, Marxism is an optimistic doctrine that has not fared well in a context dominated by working-class retreat and demoralization. The main reason for this unfortunate state of affairs is undoubtedly political.

This article is an adaptation of the introduction to Blackledge’s latest book, Friedrich Engels and Modern Social and Political Theory (SUNY Press, 2019).Īt the bicentenary of his birth, Frederick Engels’s reputation as an original thinker is, among Anglophone academics at least, at its nadir. He is coeditor of Virtue and Politics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (Brill, 2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism (Lucius and Lucius, 2008), and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (Palgrave, 2002). He is the author of Marxism and Ethics (SUNY Press, 2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester University Press, 2006), and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (Merlin Press, 2004). Paul Blackledge is a professor of Marxist theory at Shanxi University.

Friedrich engels socialism