ABSTRACT
SOME students have maintained that Marxism is nothing more than a critical method for studying society and economic history. In this manner the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács wrote that “orthodoxy in questions of Marxism relates exclusively to method.”1 But Marx felt that he had discovered far more than a mere analytical tool for the critical investigation of economic phenomena. He and Engels believed that they had discovered a fundamental social truth, one that was “true” in a sense that rival explanations of economic and social reality were not (e.g., those of the Utopian Socialists, of Proudhon, of John Stuart Mill, and of Bakunin). In his speech at the graveside of Karl Marx in 1883, Engels asserted, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.”2
