Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - MIA

Socialism: Utopian and Scientificunderstood Socialism and believed in it, a Socialist society would appear. Engels wrote, "... the Utopiansattempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these wasthe task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order andto impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the exampleof model experiments."Engels then explains the slow historical development of the dialectical philosophy over thousands ofyears; knowledge that culminated into what allowed Marx to see and explain the materialist conceptionof history, which Engels goes onto explain in the third part of this pamphlet.Engels wrote about the publication of the pamphlet:"At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative of Lille in the French Chamber ofDeputies, I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in1880, under the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique". From this French text, a Polishand a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in theoriginal language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the Germantext, have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this little book circulates in 10languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, orMarx's Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about 20,000 copiesin all.Marx/Engels Libraryhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm (2 of 2) [23/08/2000 17:40:46]