Sven-Eric Liedman
What is the nature of the ‘laws’ that Marx and Engels sought to formulate for the development of capitalism? How to understand and judge Engels’s attempt to formulate a general philosophy and worldview? These are the questions highlighted in this magnificent work that situates Marx and Engels’s writing against the background of the entire nineteenth-century world of scientific problems, from physics to historiography.
One of the major contributions to scholarship on Marx, Engels and nineteenth-century science, Liedman’s work is here presented in English translation and with a new preface by the author.
Biographical Note
Readership
Scholars of Marx and Engels, Marxism and natural sciences, theories of science in the nineteenth century, dialectical materialism, nature philosophy, the role of science in the theory of capitalism.
Table of Contents
Preface to the English Translation
The Game of Contradictions
Foreword
Introduction
Part One
1 Back to Hegel
2 The Rational Method
3 Engels on Marx and Hegel
4 The Encounter with the Natural Sciences
Part Two
5 The Return of the Systems
6 Conservation of Energy, and Systems
7 Darwinism: Hypothesis or Worldview?
8 The Human Sciences
9 Facts and Laws about Humanity
10 Texts, Structures and Systems
Part Three
11 Engels’s Four Periods
12 The Literary Sources
13 The Direct Inspirations
14 Theory and Empiricism: The Three Tendencies
15 Inorganic Nature
16 Biology and Human Science
Part Four
17 Ideology and Science
18 The Debates on Darwinism and Socialism
19 Engels and Ideology
Sources and Literature
Index of Subjects
