ABSTRACT
Old myths die hard. The very first page of Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism contains the confident assertion that “the theory of society worked out by Marx and Engels . . . [was] called by them ‘scientific socialism’ ”. Bernstein’s confidence (as is well known in other connections) was misplaced. Quite apart from the fact that today it is no longer customary to assume a joint identity for Marx and Engels, Bernstein’s assertion – which resounds through the writings of other Marxists and commentators – can be faulted on a number of grounds. The least important of these grounds is that Marx himself never used the phrase “scientific socialism”. Considering its provenance and etymology, he could not have used it. Even when Engels applied this phrase as an appropriate designation of Marxism in his Anti-Dühring, in order to combat a quite different notion of what scientific socialism was, Marx, for his part, did not adopt Engels’s use of the expression, and for very good reason.
