As Engels describes in the first German and English forewords, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was an excerpt from one of his earlier works, Herrn E. Dürings Umwalzung der Wissenschaft (1878). This text, popularly known as Anti-Dühring, was Engels’s response to Dr. Eugen Dühring (1833-1921), a contemporary German socialist with whom he and Marx had significant ideological differences. Dühring developed his own variation of socialism in opposition to the Marxian school:

The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus, became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle, whether we liked it or not. (10)

In response, Engels chastised Dühring for his “vulgar materialism” and utopian ethics of sympathy, which asserted that the Marxian conception of class antagonism was unnecessary. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific came into being several years later, when Paul Lafargue—a Cuban-French Marxist writer and son-in-law to Karl Marx—asked him to reproduce Anti-Dühring’s first three chapters as a popular propaganda pamphlet.