(3) What is the main thesis of the book?
(4) Why is it necessary that the hearer should read the book?
Above all, a book talk should be interesting. How often have we seen a speaker begin a book talk at a meeting by destroying all interest and making sales almost impossible! The speaker holds up a book in view of the audience and says: “Here is a book I want you to buy and read.” That settles it. The public has been taught to regard all efforts to sell things as attacks upon their pocketbooks, and the speaker who begins by announcing his intention to sell, at once makes himself an object of suspicion. In the commercial world it is held and admitted that a seller is seeking his own benefit and the advantages to the buyer are only incidental. In our case this is largely reversed, but that does not justify the speaker in rousing all the prejudices lying dormant in the hearer’s mind.
A good book talk thoroughly captures the interest of the audience before they know the book is on hand and is going to be offered for sale. About the middle of the talk the listener should be wondering if you are going to tell where the book can be obtained and getting ready to take down the publisher’s address when you give it.
His interest increases, and toward the close he learns to his great delight that you have anticipated his desires and he can take the volume with him when he leaves the meeting.
This is a good method, but where one is to make many book talks to much the same audience there are a great many ways in which it can be varied.
I will now submit a book talk which has enabled me to sell thousands of copies of the book it deals with. This is a ten-cent book, and this price is high enough for the speaker’s experiments. The speaker will later find it surprisingly easy, when he has mastered the art to sell fifty-cent and dollar books.
The speaker may use the substance of this talk in his own language, or, commit it to memory and reproduce it verbatim. Any one who finds the memorizing beyond his powers should abandon public speaking and devote his energies to something easy.
BOOK TALK NO. 1.
ENGELS’ SOCIALISM, UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC.
For some time previous to the year 1875 the German Socialist party had been divided into two camps—the Eisenachers and the Lassallians. About that time they closed their ranks and presented to the common enemy a united front. So great was their increase of strength from that union that they were determined never to divide again. They would preserve their newly won unity at all costs.
No sooner was this decision made than it seemed as if it was destined to be overthrown. Professor Eugene Dühring, Privat Docent of Berlin University, loudly proclaimed himself a convert to Socialism. When this great figure from the bourgeois intellectual world stepped boldly and somewhat noisily into the arena, there was not wanting a considerable group of young and uninitiated members in the party who flocked to his standard and found in him a new oracle.
This would have been well enough if Dühring had been content to take Socialism as he found it or if he had been well enough informed to make an intelligent criticism of it and reveal any mistakes in its positions. But he was neither the one or the other. He undertook, without the slightest qualification for the task, to overthrow Marx and establish a new Socialism which should be free from the lamentable blunders of the Marxian school.
Marx was a mere bungler and the whole matter must be set right without delay. This was rather a large task, but the Professor went at it in a large way. He did it in the approved German manner. Germany would be forever disgraced if any philosopher took up a new position about anything without going back to the first beginnings of the orderly universe in nebulous matter, and showing that from that time on to the discovery of the latest design in tin kettles everything that happened simply went to prove his new theory.
Dühring presented a long suffering world with three volumes that were at least large enough to fill the supposed aching void. These were: “A Course of Philosophy,” “A Course of Political and Social Science” and “A Critical History of Political Economy and Socialism.”
These large volumes gave Dühring quite a standing among ill-informed Socialists, who took long words for learning, and obscurity for profundity. His followers became so numerous that a new division of the ranks threatened and it became clear that Dühring’s large literary output must be answered.
There was a man in the Socialist movement at that time who was pre-eminently fitted for that task, who for over thirty years had proven himself a master of discussion and an accomplished scholar—Frederick Engels.
Engels’ friends urged him to rid the movement of this new intellectual incubus. Engels pleaded he was already over busy with those tasks, which show him to have been so patient and prolific a worker. Finally, realizing the importance of the case, he yielded.
Dühring had wandered all over the universe to establish his philosophy, and in his reply Engels would have to follow him. So far from this deterring Engels, it was just this which made his task attractive. He says in his preface of 1892:
“I had to treat of all and every possible subject, from the concepts of time and space to Bimetalism; from the eternity of matter and motion to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin’s natural selection to the education of youth in a future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself of this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.”
Dealing with the same point, in his biographical essay on Engels, Kautsky says:
“Dühring was a many-sided man. He wrote on Mathematics and Mechanics, as well as on Philosophy and Political Economy, Jurisprudence, Ancient History, etc. Into all these spheres he was followed by Engels, who was as many-sided as Dühring but in another way. Engels’ many-sidedness was united with a fundamental thoroughness which in these days of specialization is only found in a few cases and was rare even at that time. * * * It is to the superficial many-sidedness of Dühring that we owe the fact, that the ‘Anti-Dühring’ became a book which treated the whole of modern science from the Marx-Engels materialistic point of view. Next to ‘Capital’ the ‘Anti-Dühring’ has become the fundamental work of modern Socialism.”
Engels’ reply was published in the Leipsic “Vorwärts,” in a series of articles beginning early in 1877, and afterwards in a volume entitled, “Mr. Dühring’s Revolution in Science.” This book came to be known by its universal and popular title: “Anti-Dühring.”
After the appearance of this book Dühring’s influence disappeared. Instead of a great leader in Socialism, Dühring found himself regarded as a museum curiosity, so much so that Kautsky, writing in 1887, said:
“The occasion for the ‘Anti-Dühring’ has been long forgotten. Not only is Dühring a thing of the past for the Social Democracy, but the whole throng of academic and platonic Socialists have been frightened away by the anti-Socialist legislation, which at least had the one good effect to show where the reliable supports of our movement are to be found.”
Out of Anti-Dühring came the most important Socialist pamphlet ever published, unless, perhaps, we should except “The Communist Manifesto,” though even this is by no means certain. In 1892 Engels related the story of its birth:
“At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under the title: “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.” From this French text a Polish and a Spanish edition was prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been published. Thus, with the present English edition, this little book circulates in ten languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 or Marx’s “Capital,” has been so often translated. In Germany it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.”
The man who has the good fortune to become familiar with the contents of this pamphlet in early life will never, in after life, be able to estimate its full value as a factor in his intellectual development. I have persuaded many people to buy it and have invariably given them this advice: “Keep it in your coat pocket by day and under your pillow by night, and read it again and again until you know it almost by heart.”