Karl Eugen Dühring (12 January 1833 – 21 September 1921) was a German philosopher, economist, and socialist. Despite becoming blind in early adulthood, he was a prolific and popular lecturer at the University of Berlin. His "philosophy of the actual" was a comprehensive, materialist system that challenged German idealism, classical economics, and organized religion. He also made significant contributions to economics, law, and the natural sciences.
In the 1870s, Dühring's ideas gained significant influence within the burgeoning German Social Democratic movement, prompting Friedrich Engels to write his major polemic Anti-Dühring, which became a foundational work of Marxism. Dühring's academic career ended in 1877 with a controversial dismissal from the university following his accusations of plagiarism against Hermann von Helmholtz. The affair caused a public outcry and a student protest movement, with Dühring cast as a martyr for free thought.
After his dismissal, Dühring's thought became increasingly personal and radical. His writings took a sharply antisemitic turn, culminating in his 1881 book The Jewish Question, a key text in the history of modern, racial antisemitism. His later work advocated an extreme form of individualism which he termed "personalism", and he spent the last decades of his life in relative obscurity, promoting his views through his self-published journal, Personalist und Emancipator.
Life
Early life and education (1833–1868) Karl Eugen Dühring was born on 12 January 1833 in Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Wilhelm Ferdinand Dühring, was a Prussian civil servant and a former soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. The family was of Thuringian origin. Wilhelm Dühring was a free-thinker who admired the values of the French Revolution and educated his son at home for a time, emphasizing self-reliance and instilling in him a streak of "intellectual iconoclasm". After his father's death from tuberculosis in 1845, Dühring attended the Köllnische Realgymnasium and later the Joachimsthal Gymnasium. He was an excellent student, particularly in Latin and Greek.
In 1853, Dühring began studying law at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University. He grew deeply disappointed with the university's intellectual atmosphere, which was dominated by the historical school of law founded by Friedrich Carl von Savigny. Dühring found this "pseudo-historicism" lacking in philosophical grounding and rational principles, believing it was overly focused on philology and historical detail at the expense of true natural law. He deeply resented the religious overtones in the German education system. During this period, he turned to extracurricular studies in economics, reading Adam Smith and French socialist writers.
After finishing his dissertation in 1861, Dühring began work as a lawyer. Soon after, a progressive eye ailment, which had begun earlier, worsened dramatically, leading to his complete blindness. Forced to abandon his legal career, he decided to become an academic and a writer. He saw his blindness not merely as a handicap but as an opportunity to develop a new, "fresher" method of scholarship, free from what he called the "rotten scholarly manner" he had detested as a student. He believed his condition "actually increased his enthusiasm for justice, truth, and trying to create a new unique approach to scholarship". He developed a method of working where his wife, Emilie Gladow (a former nurse to his aunt), and later his sons, read texts aloud to him; he would then compose his works in his head and dictate them.
Dühring completed his doctoral thesis in philosophy under Adolf Trendelenburg and received his habilitation in 1863, which qualified him to lecture. He began a career as a Privatdozent (an unsalaried lecturer paid by student fees) at the University of Berlin in 1864. In 1866, he also received a habilitation in political economy, an unusual combination of disciplines at the time. His lectures, known for their lively and demonstrative style, became very popular, drawing more students than many of the tenured professors.
Rise to prominence and controversy (1868–1877)
Dühring gained national notoriety through the "Social Exposé Scandal of 1868". He had been commissioned by Hermann Wagener, an advisor to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, to write a position paper on the "social question" and the workers' movement. The paper was subsequently published, first anonymously and then under Wagener's name, without Dühring's consent. Dühring felt his honor had been insulted and successfully sued Wagener, winning a public battle that cast him as a courageous fighter against the Prussian state. The scandal made him a well-known and sympathetic figure, particularly among socialist agitators.
His academic output was immense. Between 1865 and 1866 alone, he published five books, including Natural Dialectic, Capital and Labor, and The Worth of Life. In 1871, his Critical History of the General Principles of Mechanics won the prestigious Benecke Prize from the University of Göttingen. The judging committee, which included the philosopher Hermann Lotze, praised the work's "complete and free command of the matter and amazing extension of exact literary knowledge".
Despite his academic success, Dühring's relationship with the university establishment grew increasingly hostile. He was passed over for a professorship in philosophy in 1866. His writings became more critical of his colleagues, particularly the Kathedersozialisten ("socialists of the chair") like Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner, whom he attacked by name. This led to a public conflict with Wagner in 1874, resulting in an official warning to both men from the university faculty. During this time, he also became a lecturer at the Victoria Lyceum, a new secondary school for girls, and published Women’s Path to Higher Vocational Training, championing the cause of women's education.
By the mid-1870s, Dühring's system of thought had reached its mature form, and his influence within the German Social Democratic movement was at its peak. Prominent socialists like August Bebel, Johann Most, and the young Eduard Bernstein were drawn to his work, which offered a systematic and seemingly independent alternative to both Lassalleanism and the still-obscure theories of Karl Marx. Bernstein later recalled that Dühring's "pragmatic-positive form" of socialism "spoke to me all the more" than the abstract declarations of the Communist Manifesto.
Dismissal and Anti-Dühring
Dühring's growing influence on German socialism caused alarm for Marx and Friedrich Engels. In 1876, at Marx's urging, Engels began writing a series of articles for the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts to systematically dismantle Dühring's system. These articles were later collected into the book Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, popularly known as Anti-Dühring. The work became a comprehensive and accessible exposition of what would become orthodox Marxism, covering philosophy, political economy, and socialism.
In May 1877, just as Engels's polemic was underway, the University of Berlin moved to dismiss Dühring. The official reason cited his disrespectful and polemical attacks against prominent academics, particularly the insinuation in the second edition of his Critical History of Mechanics that the renowned physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had plagiarized Julius Robert von Mayer's discovery of the law of conservation of energy. The dismissal, which took effect in the middle of the semester, caused a public uproar. The press and the public largely sided with the "erudite blind lecturer" against the university elite. A petition signed by 250 students was submitted in protest, and a large public gathering of over 2,500 students and citizens was held in Berlin to denounce the university's actions. The Social Democrats, including those who would later become Dühring's opponents, organized in his defense, viewing him as a "martyr for science".
Despite the widespread support, Dühring's alliance with the students and socialists quickly disintegrated. His authoritarian character and increasingly coarse polemics alienated his supporters. He publicly distanced himself from the Social Democrats, who he accused of using him for their own ends, and his plans to establish a "Free University" with socialist backing collapsed amid personal disputes. By the end of 1877, Dühring found himself isolated from both the academic establishment and the socialist movement. Engels's book, published in 1878, further accelerated the decline of Dühring's influence.
Later life, work, and death (1877–1921) After his dismissal, Dühring's thought entered a new, more radical phase. Financially secure from a timely inheritance from his admirer Henry Charles Carey, he devoted himself to writing. His work became increasingly focused on what he perceived as the corrupting influence of Judaism. In 1881, he published Die Judenfrage als Racen-, Sitten- und Culturfrage (The Jewish Question as a Question of Race, Morals, and Culture). The book, which went through seven editions, was a foundational text of modern, secular, and racial antisemitism. He argued that the "Semitic race" was inherently immoral and that the "Jewish spirit" was an agent of national corruption.
In the late 1880s and 1890s, a "Dühring movement" emerged. His supporters, who saw themselves as advancing a "societarian" alternative to Marxism, organized an "address movement" in 1886 to protest his exclusion from public life, gathering over 20,000 signatures. In 1893, they founded the Sozialitärer Bund (Societarian League) and a journal, Der Moderne Völkergeist (The Modern Spirit of Nations), which promoted Dühring's ideas, including his anti-Semitism. This movement also collapsed by the end of the decade due to internal conflicts.
From 1899 until his death, Dühring published his own bi-monthly journal, Personalist und Emancipator, from his home in Nowawes, a village near Potsdam. In this final phase, his thought turned toward an extreme individualism. He abandoned his earlier socialist projects, such as the "economic communes", and re-embraced private property. He now saw social reform as a matter of individual will and "personalism" against all forms of collectivism. His polemics became even more vitriolic, attacking not only his enemies but also revered figures of German culture like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Immanuel Kant.
Dühring suffered a personal tragedy in 1880 with the death of his younger son, Ernst. His wife Emilie, his long-time companion and amanuensis, died in 1911. In his final years, he also lost his hearing. He died on 21 September 1921 at the age of 88.
Thought Dühring's ambition was to create a comprehensive system that would replace the dominant German Idealism with a new philosophy grounded in materialism and modern science. He called his system Wirklichkeitsphilosophie ("philosophy of the actual"), emphasizing its focus on the concrete, observable world. His thought is characterized by a strong rationalism, a belief in the power of the conscious intellect, and a "Promethean" will to challenge and overcome all forms of unjust authority, whether intellectual, political, or religious.
Philosophy
Dühring's philosophy was heavily influenced by the positivism of Auguste Comte, whose rejection of metaphysics he praised, and the individualism of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose clear style and critique of academic philosophy he admired. However, he rejected Comte's neglect of human emotion and Schopenhauer's pessimism and metaphysics of the will. He was also influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach's materialist critique of religion.