Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science

Engels argues that Marxism is a unified scientific worldview encompassing dialectical materialism, political economy, and scientific socialism, applicable to both nature and history. He rejects Dühring's claim to have created a new universal system, exposing his ideas as eclectic borrowings from vulgar materialism, Kantian idealism, and Hegelian schematism. The book's deeper target is all 'system-creating' philosophy that substitutes abstract formulas for the materialist analysis of real social contradictions.

The book originated as a series of articles in the Leipzig newspaper Vorwärts, beginning in 1877, intended to counter Dühring's growing influence within the German Social Democratic Party. Published in book form in 1878, it offered the first systematic presentation of Marxist theory across philosophy, economics, and socialism. Lenin later praised it as a 'textbook' of scientific socialism, cementing its canonical status within the Marxist tradition.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was extracted from three chapters of Anti-Dühring and published separately in 1880 at Paul Lafargue's request. The pamphlet circulated far more widely than the parent work, becoming one of the most translated texts in the socialist canon. Engels welcomed this, viewing it as a successful popularization—though some scholars argue the extraction simplified the polemical context and encouraged a one-sided reading of Engels' argument about utopian socialism.

Marx's Capital is a rigorous critique of political economy grounded in the analysis of capitalist production relations. Anti-Dühring, by contrast, is a polemical survey that extends dialectical materialism into philosophy of nature and a general theory of motion. Some scholars argue Engels universalized Marx's historical method into a 'diamat' (dialectical materialism) applicable to natural science, a move that Marx himself regarded with skepticism. The result is a broader but methodologically distinct work from Marx's mature writings.

Dühring himself is now a forgotten figure, which paradoxically secured the book's place in Marxist literature—it is read not for its refutation but for its positive exposition of theory. Critics argue that Engels' polemical zeal led to oversimplifications and that his extension of dialectics to nature was philosophically problematic. Defenders contend it remains valuable as the clearest single-volume introduction to the Marxist worldview as Engels understood it.