Eugen Dühring

Eugen Dühring (1833 to 1921) was a German philosopher, economist and socialist, born in Berlin in the Kingdom of Prussia. Blind from early adulthood, he nevertheless became a prolific and popular lecturer at the University of Berlin and built a materialist philosophy of the actual that challenged German idealism, classical economics and organized religion. His influence within the German Social Democratic movement in the 1870s led Friedrich Engels to write Anti-Dühring, a foundational work of Marxism. He was dismissed from the university in 1877 after accusing Hermann von Helmholtz of plagiarism, and his later writing turned sharply antisemitic, notably The Jewish Question of 1881. He spent his last decades in relative obscurity promoting an extreme individualism he called personalism through his own journal.