Eugen Karl Dühring (1833–1921)

German philosopher and vulgar economist; petty-bourgeois socialist.

Dühring was born on January, 12, 1833, in Berlin, into a civil servant’s family. Between 1853 and 1856, Dühring studied at the Faculty of Law of the University of Berlin. After graduating from university, After graduating from the university, he worked as a trainee judge and lawyer at the Berlin High Court, but later withdrew from the legal profession due to an eye disease that prevented him from working properly. From 1863 to 1877, Dühring was a lecturer at the University of Berlin. In 1877, he was dismissed from his teaching post at the University of Berlin for his anti-government stance. In 1867, after the publication of the first volume of Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1, Dühring published in the newspaper an article which attacked Marx’s Capital. Between 1871–1875, presenting himself as a “reformer” of socialism, Dühring successively published Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism (1871), Course in Political and Social Economy (1873), and Course in Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific Worldview and Guide for Life (1875) and other works, systematically preached his transcendental idealist philosophy, vulgar economy and theory of reactionary socialism, and boasted of the so-called “complete revolution” he made in the fields of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

In philosophy, Dühring preached idealist transcendentalism and eclecticism, mingling idealism, vulgar materialism, and positivism; in economics, he preached vulgar political economy, and opposed Marx’s theory of surplus-value and theory of capitalist economic crisis; in the theory of socialism, he preached bourgeois reformism, and advocated petty-bourgeois egalitarian socialism on the premise of not changing the capitalist mode of production. Dühring’s thoughts had a pernicious impact on the German workers’ movement and within the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In order to clear away the influence of Dühring’s thoughts, Engels wrote Anti-Dühring during 1877–1878, comprehensively criticized Dühring’s erroneous and reactionary thoughts, and expounded the fundamental principles of Marxism from the three aspects of philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism. After the October Revolution, Dühring adopted a hostile attitude towards the Soviet power and attacked communism and the Soviet state. On September 21, 1921, Dühring died in Nowawes, Germany.