"Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence"
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No mercy, no nostalgia: Engels stages Reason as a courtroom and drags the entire inherited world into the dock. The line is blunt enough to sound like common sense, but its edge comes from how it weaponizes a familiar Enlightenment ideal. Reason isn’t a private faculty here; it’s a public tribunal with the authority to revoke legitimacy. “Everything” means institutions, traditions, religious claims, property arrangements, and the polite alibis that keep them standing. If they can’t produce a rational account of their necessity, they don’t merely deserve critique - they forfeit the right to continue.
The subtext is political. Engels is not asking for better arguments; he’s announcing a standard that dissolves the sacred. The “judgment seat” imagery hints at the old religious Last Judgment, then flips it: theology is displaced by rational scrutiny, and faith-based authority becomes the defendant. That inversion is part of the punch. It borrows the drama of moral reckoning while routing it through a secular procedure.
Context matters: Engels writes from the long wake of the French Revolution and the industrial upheavals of the 19th century, when “rational” reforms and capitalist modernization were already bulldozing customary life. He shares the era’s confidence that history can be audited, but he’s also sharpening a tool for socialist critique: if monarchy, church privilege, and exploitative labor relations claim permanence, let them justify themselves under cross-examination. The sentence works because it sounds like an impartial rule while smuggling in a revolutionary verdict: what exists is not automatically entitled to exist.
The subtext is political. Engels is not asking for better arguments; he’s announcing a standard that dissolves the sacred. The “judgment seat” imagery hints at the old religious Last Judgment, then flips it: theology is displaced by rational scrutiny, and faith-based authority becomes the defendant. That inversion is part of the punch. It borrows the drama of moral reckoning while routing it through a secular procedure.
Context matters: Engels writes from the long wake of the French Revolution and the industrial upheavals of the 19th century, when “rational” reforms and capitalist modernization were already bulldozing customary life. He shares the era’s confidence that history can be audited, but he’s also sharpening a tool for socialist critique: if monarchy, church privilege, and exploitative labor relations claim permanence, let them justify themselves under cross-examination. The sentence works because it sounds like an impartial rule while smuggling in a revolutionary verdict: what exists is not automatically entitled to exist.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring — English translation available (see Marxists.org); the line is commonly cited from Engels' Anti-Dühring. |
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