DRAFT: Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire: 6.1. The Kingdom of Friedrich Engels's Utopian Dreams that Did Not Come, 1900-1945

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Friedrich Engels saw socialized production clearly—but missed the ethnonational maps that would colonize the workers’ heads. Ernst Gellner’s theory of nationalism and Charlie Maier’s theory of applied-science economy zero-sum interest-group distributional war explain to us why Engels’s Kingdom did not come in the years 1900-1945…It was Friedrich Engels’s doubling down on dialectical materialism and historical materialism as master knowledges that put his successors on the road where they prayed “Thy Kingdom Come” and “thy will be done” as fervently as any human ever has. Only their prayers were, as Edmund Wilson wrote in his To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing & Acting of History, directed not to any god but to History herself.This is a piece of the manuscript of my in-the-process-of-writing book, Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire: The Human Economy & Society Since the Year -700,000. These words are, of course, very heavily adapted and transformed from my lecture notes. The principal books I am reacting to here—the principal giants on whose shoulders dwarfish me is trying to stand—are, in addition to Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing & Acting of History: Friedrich Engels, Socialisn: Utopian & Scientific; Ernst Gellner, Nations & Nationalism; and Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe. This book subchapter is in memory of my friend the late Robert James Waldmann, whom I promised, exactly a year ago, that I would get this section to him soon.ShareGive a gift subscription6.1.1. What Friedrich Engels Saw. Without a doubt, Friedrich E…