Book: Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy

Introduction
Friedrich Engels offers a clear, forceful reading of Ludwig Feuerbach as the decisive turning point that ended classical German philosophy and opened the way to materialist social science. Engels portrays Feuerbach as the thinker who stripped Hegelian idealism of its mist and returned philosophy to the sensuous, human world. The account situates Feuerbach between the abstract systems of post-Hegelian idealists and the emerging critique of society that would become Marxism.

Feuerbach's Materialist Turn
Feuerbach is celebrated for redirecting philosophical attention from absolute ideas to human beings as embodied, sensuous creatures. Religion is interpreted as a human projection: divine attributes are human qualities alienated and ascribed to a fictional deity. By showing God as a human product, Feuerbach relocated the source of meaning and value to man's earthly needs, feelings, and social life rather than to metaphysical speculation.

Critique of Hegelian Idealism
Engels emphasizes Feuerbach's decisive rejection of Hegel's idealist primacy of thought. Where Hegel made the development of Spirit the motor of reality, Feuerbach insisted that thought arises from material life. Engels praises Feuerbach for undoing the mystification of consciousness as an independent force and for insisting that ideas reflect human, corporeal conditions. That critical reversal is presented as the necessary demolition of the last stronghold of speculative philosophy.

Contributions and Limits
While applauding Feuerbach's insights, Engels insists they were incomplete. Feuerbach restored humanity to the center of philosophical inquiry but often treated humans in abstraction from their social relations and historical labor. His materialism remained largely contemplative, emphasizing immediate sensuous experience without adequately analyzing the economic and class processes that shape human existence. Feuerbach's focus on the species-essence of man tended toward a fixed anthropological notion rather than a dynamic account of social becoming.

The Leap to Historical Materialism
Engels traces how Marx surpassed Feuerbach by historicizing materialism: social being, production, and class relations are not static givens but historically specific processes that determine consciousness. The decisive move is to connect ideas to the concrete forms of labor, property, and struggle. Engels stresses that theory must be joined to practice; revolutionary transformation is necessary to abolish the conditions that produce alienation. Thus Marxist materialism transforms Feuerbach's critique of religion into a scientific investigation of society and a program for emancipation.

Political and Methodological Implications
The essay underlines a methodological shift from critique to praxis. Feuerbach's humanism clarified the target, the human condition under alienating forms, but did not provide the tools to analyze or change those forms. Engels locates the political content of Marxism precisely in its capacity to explain how economic structures produce ideology and in its insistence that workers' self-emancipation is the motor of history. Theory becomes effective only when rooted in the study of real social relations and directed toward collective action.

Conclusion
Feuerbach is credited with ending the dominance of Hegelian speculation by reinstating the senses and human life as the starting point of thought. Engels acknowledges the decisive historical role of that rupture while insisting on the need for a further theoretical advance, one that situates human essence within labor, production, and class struggle. The result is a portrait of Feuerbach as indispensable but insufficient: the pivot from classical German philosophy to a materialist, historically grounded critique that culminates in Marxism.