Marx treated nationalism’s historical role as ambiguous while Engels saw it as threatening

Evidence

Their habits of thought tended toward the recognition of different forces if not configurations in human experience. The familiar, in the instance of Marx, was of things philosophically dialectical and reflective, with Engels it was the mundane and the practical instincts of the market place. While Marx tended, at the level of the historical epic, to discover the forces of the new world disguised in epiphenomenal forms, Engels’s commitment to the revolutionary vision determined for him ultimately, the uses of history (and science). With respect to nationalism, Marx was the more likely to recognize that as an ideology its historical significance was ambiguous at worst, and Engels that such ambiguity constituted an unacceptable threat. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Distinguishes Marx’s dialectical vs Engels’s practical cast of mind on nationalism, feeding the reader’s arc question about orthodoxy’s treatment of the national question.