Friedrich Engels carved out this pamphlet from his larger work Anti-Dühring, which was a response to Eugen Dühring's socialist theories. "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" tables the major elements of the larger Anti-Dühring work, and remains a concise reading of Marxist ideas. In his introduction to the work, Engels presents the history of materialism and the birth of the English middle-class; in the following three chapters, he describes the efforts at pre-Marxist socialism as proposed by key Utopian Socialism French philosophers of the 18th and 19th century (Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen); dialectical philosophy, as proposed by Hegel; and, finally, historical materialism, in which he propounds the notion that economic reality is key to determining society.