In “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Friedrich Engels’s ([1880] 2003: 126) critique of the utopian socialists Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen is scathing. They have created “a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition.” Yet he and Karl Marx also claim in “The Communist Manifesto” that utopian socialist writings “attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1978: 498). In his 1892 preface to the English edition of “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Engels ([1880/1892] 2003) offers a possible explanation for this apparent tension. There, he traces the longer history of utopian socialism to the radical writings on reason and freedom by French and German Enlightenment philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottlieb Fichte,...

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