Monday, 2 November 2026 — MROnline

When Friedrich Engels walked through the intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, his great philosophical crusade was to extract the dialectic from the ethereal clouds of Hegelian idealism and anchor it firmly within the soil of the material world. Yet, the material world available to Engels, Karl Marx, and their contemporaries was culturally dominated by the monumental successes of Isaac Newton. Classical science viewed reality as a massive, deterministic clockwork assembly. In that universe, nature was ultimately reducible to individual, self-contained, unchangeable pieces of matter, billiard balls that populated an absolute space and time, interacting only through external collisions and localised forces. Materialism, under this lens, became synonymous with a dull, passive, and mechanical reductionism.






