Friedrich Engels and Marxism as the Apex of Human Thought

In 1886, three years after the death of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels published his classic article Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. In this important document on the early developments of Marxism post Marx, Engels lays out what he perceives to be the fundamental relationship between the “materialist conception of history” and the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. In this paper, I will attempt to show that in his evaluation of Hegel and the Hegelian school Engels himself employs concepts taken from the philosophy of Hegel and uses them to style Marxism as the perfection of the true, revolutionary essence of Hegel’s philosophy. Marxism, Engels argues, is the perfect-most form of materialism and materialism, in turn, is the perfect-most form of philosophy as such. Therefore, Marxism is the actualisation of philosophy, its realisation in the world and the apex of human understanding. This analysis also has interesting implications for our understanding of the relationship of Marx and Engels both to the failed revolutions of 1848-49. If the materialist conception of history—which Marx and Engels had first coined in The German Ideology (1846)—was truly the apex of human understanding, and if this analytic framework predicted the inevitable victory of the coming Bourgeois revolution, then why did the revolution fail? This paper will also present some reflections on this important question by comparing Engels’ 1886 conception of the role of ideas vs. material conditions in history with Marx and Engels’ conception in 1844.