Reading different or controversial intentions into Marx
and Engels’ works has been somewhat a common but rather
unquestioned practice in the history of Marxist scholarship. Engels’
Dialectics of Nature, a torso for some and a great book for others, is a
case in point. A bold line seems to shape the entire Engels debate and
separate two opposite views in this regard: Engels the contaminator of
Marx’s materialism vs. Engels the self-started genius of dialectical
materialism. What Engels, unlike Marx, has not enjoyed so far is a
critical reflection upon the relationship between different layers of this
text: authorial, textual, editorial and interpretational. Informed by a
historical hermeneutic, inquiry into the elements that structure the
debate on “Dialectics of Nature,” and into the different political and
philosophical functions attached to it, makes it possible to relocate the
meaning of “dialectics” in a more precise context. Engels’ dialectics is
less complete than we usually think it is, but he achieved more than
most scholars would like to admit
