Why Friedrich Engels wrote a massive book to dismantle this forgotten German polymath

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Eugen Dühring was a prolific 19th-century philosopher and economist whose radical ideas once threatened the foundations of Marxism. Though largely a footnote today, his influence was so significant that Friedrich Engels felt compelled to pen the polemic Anti-Dühring to neutralize his socialist theories and his perceived vulgar materialism.

Born in Berlin in 1833, Eugen Dühring was a polymath who mastered fields ranging from mathematics and physics to literature and political economy. Despite becoming blind in early adulthood, he maintained a rigorous academic career, lecturing at the University of Berlin from 1864 to 1877. His scholarship was defined by a fierce, iconoclastic independence; he was an unflinching critic of religion, militarism, and the university establishment, eventually losing his post in 1877 following a public dispute over plagiarism accusations.

Dühring’s economic and social theories were rooted in an optimistic belief in human sympathy. He rejected the social Darwinist notion of a constant struggle for existence, advocating instead for a free society where power-based relations were abolished. This perspective led him to dismiss the Marxist dichotomy between capitalist and proletariat as unnecessary. His work gained significant traction within the German Social Democratic movement during the 1870s, making him a primary intellectual rival to Marxian socialists of the era.

The legacy of Dühring is complex and often overshadowed by his later, radical turn toward antisemitism and extreme individualism, which he termed personalism. While his early work earned him prestigious recognition, such as the Benecke Prize from the University of Göttingen in 1871, his later years were spent in relative obscurity. Today, he is remembered less for his own contributions to philosophy and more as the target of Engels’s foundational Marxist critique, a testament to the ideological intensity of 19th-century German intellectual life.

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