Understanding Friedrich Engels (and Marx) and Adam Smith on Economic Organization and the Price Mechanism

In an influential review of W. O. Henderson’s Life of Friedrich Engels, the late T. W. Hutchison wrote with undisguised anger that it “would be ... quite erroneous to suppose, because Engels and Marx for decades on end believed that the demise of capitalism, which they so desired, was only months away, that they therefore felt any intellectual or moral obligation to give some thought to the kind of economic organization which would, or could, follow. The Utopian vacuities blurted out by Engels (in his Principles of Communism) are as far as they got.” The charge is yet stronger.