The special views which it criticised are practically
forgotten to-day. The work itself has not only been placed before many
thousands of readers by its serial publication in "Vorwaerts" of
Leipsic in 1877 and 1878, but it has also been published in large
editions in its entirety. How then can there be any further interest
in what I have to say about Herr Duehring?

In the first place, I fancy, that it is owing to the fact that this
book, as indeed, all my writings at that time, was prohibited in
Germany soon after the publication of the anti-Socialist laws.
Whosoever was not fettered by the inherited officialdom of the
countries of the Holy Alliance should have clearly seen the effect of
this measure--the double and treble sale of the prohibited books, and
the advertisement of the impotence of the gentlemen in Berlin, who
issued injunctions and could not make them effective. Indeed the
amiability of the Government was the cause of the publication of
several new editions of my shorter writings, as I am able to affirm. I
have no time for a proper revision of the text and so allow it to go
to press, just as it is.

But there is still an additional circumstance. The "system" of Herr
Duehring here criticised spreads over a very extensive theoretical
ground and I was compelled to pursue him all over it and to place my
ideas in antagonism to his. Negative criticism thereupon became
positive; the polemic developed into a more or less connected
exposition of dialectic methods and the socialist philosophy, of which
Marx and myself are representative, and this in quite a number of
places. These our philosophic ideas have had an incubation period of
about twenty years since they were first given to the world in Marx's
"Misere de la Philosophie" and the Communist Manifesto until they
obtained a wider and wider influence through the publication of
"Capital" and now find recognition and support far beyond the limits
of Europe in all lands where a proletariat exists together with
progressive scientific thinkers. It seems that there is also a public
whose interests in this matter are sufficient to induce them to
purchase the polemic against Duehring's opinions, in spite of the fact
that it is now without an object, and who evidently derive pleasure
from the positive development.

I must call attention to the fact, by the way, that the views here set
out were, for by far the most part, developed and established by Marx,
and only to