What is the nature of the 'laws' that Marx and Engels sought to formulate for the development of capitalism? How to understand and judge Engels's attempt to formulate a general philosophy and worldview? These are the questions highlighted in this magnificent work that situates Marx and Engels’s writing against the background of the entire nineteenth-century world of scientific problems, from physics to historiography.

One of the major contributions to scholarship on Marx, Engels and nineteenth-century science, Liedman's work is here presented in English translation and with a new preface by the author.