SOURCE: “Engels' Contribution to Marxism,” in The Socialist Register 1965, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville, Monthly Review Press, 1965, pp. 297-310.

In the following essay, Hodges investigates the nature and extent of Engels' contribution to Marxist social theory and concludes, among other things, that there are significant differences between the dialectical methods of Marx and Engels and that Engels “did a disservice” to Marx's “analytical and critical method” when he attempted to make Marx's methodology “universal in scope.”

Now that knowledge of Marxism has become a respected path to academic advancement, scholars have increasingly occupied themselves with minute analyses of the differences between Marx's and Engels' writings, and with Engels' role as the foremost interpreter and disseminator of Marxism as a social and philosophical system. A survey of current writing on Marx and Engels in the English language shows two major efforts of scholarship: the reinterpretation of Marx's...