By Tristram Hunt
Friedrich Engels is among the most fascinating and contradictory figures of the 19th century. Born to a wealthy mercantile relatives in west Germany, he spent his profession operating within the Manchester cotton undefined, driving to the Cheshire hounds, and having fun with the comfy, middle-class lifetime of a Victorian gentleman. but Engels used to be additionally the co-founder of overseas communism - the philosophy which within the twentieth century got here to manage one 3rd of the human race. He used to be the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless get together tactician, and the guy who sacrificed his most sensible years so Karl Marx might write Das Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the variety and enthusiasm of Engels's period: how one of many nice bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous own existence with this uncompromising political philosophy. Set opposed to the backdrop of progressive Europe and industrializing England - of Manchester generators, Paris barricades, and East finish moves - it's a tale of dedicated friendship, classification compromise, ideological fight, and relations betrayal.
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Extra info for The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
Example text
Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. 14 It is equally true that much of the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism in the twentieth century sought its validity, however spurious, in elements of Engels's later codification of Marxism. But just as it is now possible, as the post-1989 polemical dust settles and the socialism of Marx and Engels is no longer automatically obscured by the long, Leninist shadow of the Soviet Union, to take a renewed look at Marx, so we can also begin to approach Engels afresh.
Symbolically, at the heart of the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism stood precisely this dynamic of contradiction – how the interpenetration of opposites and the negation of the negation explain the evolution of the natural, physical and social sciences. Right from his initial conversion to communism, Engels, the well-born scion of Prussian Calvinist merchants, lived that tension in a transparently personal way. And so this biography is also the memoir of a fox-hunting man: how a womanizing, champagne-drinking capitalist helped to found an ideology which was both contrary to his class interests and would, over the decades, morph into a dull, puritanical faith utterly at odds with the character of its founders.
20 Meanwhile, Elise's own father, the pastor Gerhard van Haar, introduced the adolescent Engels to the legends of classical mythology – a subject which found fertile ground in his grandson's energetic imagination. ‘O you dear Grandfather, who always treat us so kindly,’ Engels began one poetic thank you note, Always helping us when our work isn't going so smoothly, While you were here, you told me many a beautiful story Of Cercyon and Theseus, and Argus the hundred-eyed monster, The Minotaur, Ariadne, and Aegeus drowned in the ocean, The Golden Fleece, the Argonauts and Jason defiant…21 Within this comfortable setting, Engels's father is traditionally portrayed as an unhappy, rigidly religious, money-hungry philistine thanks in no small part to his son's later bitter characterizations.