Friedrich Engels Showed Us How We Can Make History
A hostile caricature depicts Friedrich Engels as an arch-determinist who presented human beings as the puppets of economic forces. In fact, his historical writings were subtle and sophisticated, showing how human agency can change the course of history.
There is a myth that Friedrich Engels distorted Karl Marx’s revolutionary social theory into a form of technological determinism. In fact, Engels was a highly sophisticated thinker who placed human agency at the center of the historical process. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
There is a myth that Friedrich Engels distorted Karl Marx’s revolutionary social theory into a politically fatalistic form of technological determinism. While it is possible to pull phrases out of context to justify this claim, the truth is that Engels was a highly sophisticated thinker with an encyclopedic knowledge of history who placed conscious human agency at the center of his understanding of the historical process. While he understood human agency to be materially determined, his model of determination was anything but mechanical and reductive.
E. P. Thompson was unquestionably right when he argued that we should guard against attempts to make Engels the “whipping boy” for any defect “that one chooses to impugn to subsequent Marxism.” And Perry Anderson justifiably bent the stick against attempts to denigrate the legacy of Engels legacy when he suggested that he was actually a stronger historian than Marx: “Engels’s historical judgements are nearly always superior to those of Marx. He possessed a deeper knowledge of European history, and had a surer grasp of its successive and salient structures.”
The Birth of Historical Materialism
In his own, eminently sensible comments on the method he and Marx developed, Engels made an observation that has become famous:
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