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Debating violence on the desert island: Engels, Dühring and Robinson Crusoe

Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

Ever since the publication in 1719 of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the novel’s eponymous protagonist has had a pervasive presence in the modern social and cultural imaginary, giving rise to an entire literary genre known as Robinsonades. In Anti-Dühring (1877), Friedrich Engels identifies such a Robinsonade in the work of Eugen von Dühring, the target of his polemic, and draws on it for a critique of ahistorical theories of violence. The particular version of the Robinsonade Engels ascribes to Dühring is fabricated, yet a close examination of this fabrication suggests that it serves important analytic and interpretive purposes. Ironically, Engels’s critique of Robinsonades is so compelling that it ends up undermining his own tendency to economic and technological reductionism. Despite Engels’s attempts to distance himself from the Robinsonade he projects onto Dühring, the Crusoe story acts as a fraught supplement to his own theory of violence. In particular, it reveals the tensions in his work between, on the one hand, economic and technological reductionism, and on the other hand, attention to social, cultural and symbolic forces without which no plausible history of violence can be written.

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Notes

  1. The Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei was founded in 1875 on the basis of the Gotha program (see Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, MECW 24, pp. 75–99) to unite the German Labor movement following the split between the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, grouped in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (founded in 1863) and those of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who were associated in the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (founded in 1869 in the town of Eisenach, hence the party is also known as the Eisenacher).

  2. Wilhelm Liebknecht to Engels, 1 February 1875; Liebknecht to Engels, 21 April 1875 (MEGA I/27, pp. 685–686).

  3. Although Marx offered some notes as a contribution to the book, the extent to which he approved of Engels’s text remains controversial. In the secondary literature today, few accept the claim by the editors of the MEGA (1988), that Anti-Dühring consolidates Marx and Engels’s research (MEGA I/27, p. 16*) or, as Merkel (1985), the managing editor of the volume, proposed that the book had been written in ‘unmittelbarer Zusammenarbeit mit Marx’. Critics, notably Thomas (1976) and Carver (1980, 1984, 2003), have pointed to the fact that Marx’s contribution was only mentioned in the preface to the second edition of Anti-Dühring, published after Marx’s death. In contrast, Welty (1983) and Stanley and Zimmermann (1984) contend that in the absence of any explicit dissociation on behalf of Marx, there is no reason to assume a disagreement.

  4. For details, see the editorial comments in MEGA I/27, pp. 695–697. Engels’s personal copy of the first edition of the Cursus (IML/Berlin, Sign. Ma719) is part of the Marx–Engels Archive located in the SAPMO collection in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. His copy of the second edition is located in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow (RGASPI 1/1/3725).

  5. Adamiak (1974, p. 110) argues that Dühring ‘stood to the left of Marx and Engels’ and that Engels purposely ‘misrepresents Dühring’ in order to reverse their positions.

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Acknowledgements

For comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, I would like to thank Arash Abizadeh, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Terrell Carver, Sam Chambers, Evan Fox-Decent, James Ingram, Hagar Kotef, Jacob Levy, Nancy Luxon, Robert Sparling, Joan Tronto, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and the anonymous reviewers.

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Winter, Y. Debating violence on the desert island: Engels, Dühring and Robinson Crusoe. Contemp Polit Theory 13, 318–338 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2013.28

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