One reason for the lack of interest from Marx in his earlier writings was their basis in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his lifetime, Marx was not well-known outside of a small circle until 1867, when the first volume of Capital was published. By this time, Hegel was seen as long out of date, and no importance was attached to his influence on Marx. Marx was instead viewed as an economist who had set out to prove scientifically the inevitable decline of capitalism. The intellectual development of the Marxists of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov, Eduard Bernstein and Heinrich Cunow took place in a cultural climate dominated by Darwinism. This interest in Darwinism was shared by Friedrich Engels. In the later years of Marx's life and shortly after Marx's death, Engels published a number of philosophical works: Anti-Duhring, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. These writings were seen to provide a general philosophical theory that was absent in Marx himself. It was primarily through these later works of Engels that the first generation of Marxists were attracted to Marxism. For them, Marxism was an objective and scientific doctrine of the laws of social development - a "scientific socialism" free from any ethical or metaphysical elements.
