Over the past one hundred years, numerous interpretations of Marx and Engles have provided one-sided analyses of historical materialism that emphasized either freedom or determinism, humanism or structuralism, utopianism or science. In this provocative study, Joseph For Ferraro takes one of these dichotomies, freedom versus determinism, and argues that determinism must be re-examined in order to comprehend the dialectical subtlety of Marx and Engels' thought. Reconstructing Marx and Engels' method through an analysis of the forms of abstraction that they employed, together with the nature of the social "laws" that they uncovered, for our own has produced a necessary corrective to the numerous lopsided interpretations of classical Marxist thought.Basing his discussion on a wide range of Marxist literature, for all shows how those who have emphasized freedom but neglected determinism have lost any sense of historical necessity or of the inner logic of history. He then argues that both freedom and determinism are part of all of Marx and Engels' observations of society and together they constitute the core of the Marxist dialectic. --- from book's back cover