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Dühring was born on 12 January 1833 in Berlin and died on 21 September 1921 at Nowawes bei Potsdam. The son of a Prussian state official, Dühring studied law, philosophy and economics at the University of Berlin and practised law until blindness obliged him to abandon this career. He then became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin, where he taught philosophy and economics from 1863 to 1877, and began to write voluminously on a wide range of subjects, from the natural sciences to philosophy, social theory and socialism, his aim being to construct a system of social reform based upon positive science. His system was expounded in a series of books on capital and labour (1865), the principles of political economy (1866), a critical history of philosophy (1869), a critical history of political economy and socialism (1871), and courses in political economy and philosophy (1873, 1875). Duhring was an adherent of positivism, concerned in his philosophical works to expound a ‘strictly scientific world outlook’, in opposition particularly to the Hegelian dialectic. His economic writings emphasize the role of political factors in the development of capitalism, and he argued that social injustice is not caused primarily by the economic system, but by social and political circumstances, the remedy being to control the misuse of private property and capital (not abolish them) through workers’ organizations and state intervention.

Schumpeter (1954, pp. 509–10), praised Dühring’s history of mechanics (1873), which was awarded an academic prize, suggested that he would retain a prominent place in the history of anti-metaphysical and positivist currents of thought, and noted that he made an important criticism of Marxist theory in his argument that political causes had played a major part in constituting the property relations of capitalist society. In other respects, however, Schumpeter considered that Dühring had made no significant contribution to economic theory.

Engels, in his well-known book (originally published as a series of articles), Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring] (1877–8), which has done more than anything else to keep Dühring’s name alive, took a much more critical view, deriding his work as a prime example of the ‘higher nonsense’ which infected German academic life. His philosophical views were dismissed by Engels as ‘vulgar materialism’ and compared unfavourably with the ‘revolutionary side’ of Hegel’s dialectics; and in the chapter of Anti-Dühring devoted to the history of political economy (largely written by Marx, but not published in full until the third edition of the book in 1894), Dühring was castigated for his superficiality and theoretical misconceptions. It was, however, the concern with Dühring’s programme of social reform, and its possible baleful effect on the developing labour movement (Eduard Bernstein, for example, was initially impressed by Dühring’s Cursus of 1873, though soon repelled by his anti-Semitism) that originally provoked Engels’s articles, and was countered in the final section of the book (frequently reprinted later as a separate text under the title Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) by an exposition of Marxist socialism which became enormously influential.

It seems doubtful that Dühring occupies more than a minor place in the history of economic and social thought, except for this encounter with Marx and Engels, though Schumpeter (1954, p. 509) called him a ‘significant thinker’ and the entry in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1931, vol. 5, p. 273) described his writings as ‘among the important intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century’.

Selected Works

  • 1871. Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökomie und des Sozialismus. Berlin: T. Grieben.

  • 1873. Cursus der National- und Sozialökonomie einschliesslich der Hauptpunkte der Finanzpolitik. Berlin: T. Grieben.

  • 1875. Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung. Leipzig: E. Koschny.