"Engels's analysis has faced criticism in the twentieth century, both for its anthropological inaccuracy and for its theoretical confusion. Simone de Beauvoir found the materialist position inadequate to describe the nature of female subordination. "Historical materialism takes for granted facts that call for explanations.... It cannot provide solutions for the problems we have raised, because these concern the whole man and not that abstraction: Homo economicus." Simone de Beauvoir argued that woman's oppression is at bottom not based on economic factors, for "if the human consciousness had not included the original category of the Other and an original aspiration to dominate the Other, the invention of the bronze tool could not have caused the oppression of woman." More recently Ann Lane has attacked not materialism but Engels's inconsistency in applying it. She has argued that Engels mistakenly believed "that the responsibilities of home and family, and the economic ties that bind them together, are not an important part of what establishes their cohesion, that society can remove a vital function of an institution in order to perfect it. Socialist society will strip the family of most of its traditional jobs, but the family itself, in its pristine state, untouched by history or reality, shall remain.""
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Economists from GermanyPhilosophers from GermanyMarxistsBusinesspeople from GermanyCommunists from Germany
Original Language: English
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Sources
Margaret S Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (1981)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels
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Friedrich Engels
1820 – 1895
deutscher Politiker, Ă–konom, Philosoph, MitbegrĂĽnder des Kommunismus und Sozialist
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