The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels: 30th Anniversary Edition

Worldwide political changes since 1990 have driven a re-evaluation of Marxism, a renaissance in Marx-studies, and a renewed interest in his lifelong intellectual partner and personal friend Friedrich Engels.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 298 pages
Publication date: 01 September 2021
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Since 1990, significant political transformations have prompted a reassessment of Marxism, a resurgence of Marx-studies, and a renewed fascination with Friedrich Engels, his lifelong intellectual partner and personal friend. In Terrell Carver's 30th-anniversary edition of his groundbreaking biographical study, which remains the sole one to provide a balanced account of Engels' pre-Marx, with-Marx, and post-Marx writings, offering a comprehensive perspective of his life and thought, Carver adopts a comparative and critical approach, neither assuming the "perfect partnership" as a given nor presuming that all the intellectual fireworks were Marx's. Engel's famously "bourgeois class position" and "champagne socialist lifestyle" emerge as resolutions rather than contradictions, providing opportunities for activist writing and politicking that would not otherwise occur. This study is driven by questions that readers might like to ask about Engels rather than by the sheer weight of archival materials and stereotypical framing. A newly written introduction offers reflections on how politics since the 1990s has brought Marx, Engels, and Marxisms back to life, and how the publication of the Marx-Engels "Collected Works" in a definitive edition and in English translation has fostered interpretive innovation.

Engels himself undertook his best efforts to establish his own biographical narrative. This book empowers readers to form their own judgments about that prevailing view.

Weight: 419g
Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783030492625
Edition number: 1st ed. 2021