The Materialism of the Encyclopedists

1. Socialism: Utopian & Scientific
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm

2. The Holy Family




Frederick Engels
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific


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II
[Dialectics]

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In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the
18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in
Hegel.

Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the
highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born
natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them,
had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.
The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also
dialectics had brilliant exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had,
especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly
fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which also
the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated, at all
events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the
restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of
dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and
Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite
parmi less hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential character of
these two modes of thought.

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