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philosophy, by Frederick Engels

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Title: Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy

Author: Frederick Engels

Translator: Austin Lewis

Release Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #27814]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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FEUERBACH

THE ROOTS OF THE SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY

BY
FREDERICK ENGELS

TRANSLATED WITH CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
BY
AUSTIN LEWIS

CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

Copyright, 1903

By CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

INTRODUCTION.

This work takes us back nearly sixty years, to a time when what is now a
movement of universal significance was in its infancy. Hegel and the
Revolution of 1848; these are the points of departure. To the former, we
owe the philosophic form of the socialist doctrine, to the latter, its
practical activity as a movement.

In the midst of the turmoil and strife and apparent defeat of those days
two men, Marx and Engels, exiled and without influence, betook
themselves to their books and began laboriously to fashion the form and
doctrine of the most powerful intellectual and political movement of all
time. To the task they brought genius, scholarship, and a capacity for
hard work and patient research. In each of these qualities they were
supreme. Marx possessed a colossal mind; no thinker upon social
subjects, not even Herbert Spencer, has been his superior, for the
lonely socialist could claim a comprehensiveness, a grasp of relations
and a power of generalization, together with a boldness of conception,
which p