ABSTRACT
Friedrich Engels' critique of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy of nature is the same as Karl Marx's. Although all interpreters agree on the extensive influence of Hegelian thought on Marx, hardly any of the many commentators on this relationship have paid attention to Marx's critique of Hegel's philosophy of nature, the second part of the Encyclopedia. When Marx depicts nature dialectically, he depicts his natural starting point in the form of natural history. If Hegel says that everything begins with the Idea, then by definition there can be no dialectics prior to the Idea; there can be no dialectics of nature per se, hence no natural history. Marx seems to anticipate his own call to set Hegel "right side up again". It finds an expression of the "classical inversion" thesis of the orthodox tradition in which Marx's thought is seen as a materialist version of Hegel's dialectics, with its stress on inevitable laws of development, including Engels' dialectics of nature.
