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The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
Metropolitan Books
August 2009
On Sale: August 18, 2009
448 pages
ISBN: 0805080252
EAN: 9780805080254
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
A remarkable new biography from one of Britain’s leading
young historians that recovers the co-founder of communism
from the shadows of history Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and
contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a
prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life
working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the
Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-
class existence of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also, with Karl Marx, the founder of
international communism, which in the twentieth century
came to govern one-third of the human race. He was the
coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party
tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so
that Marx could write Das Kapital. His searing account of
the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working
Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and
brutal indictments of the human costs of capitalism. Far
more than Marx’s indispensable aide, Engels was a profound
thinker in his own right—on warfare, feminism, urbanism,
Darwinism, technology, and colonialism. With fierce
clarity, he predicted the social effects of today’s free-
market fundamentalism and unstoppable globalization. Drawing on a wealth of letters and archives, acclaimed
historian Tristram Hunt plumbs Engels’s intellectual legacy
and shows us how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian
Britain reconciled his exuberant personal life with his
radical political philosophy. Set against the backdrop of
revolutionary Europe and industrializing England—of
Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes—
Marx’s General tells a story of devoted friendship, class
compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal. And
it tackles head-on the question of Engels’s influence: was
Engels, after Marx’s death, responsible for some of the
most devastating turns of twentieth-century history, or was
the idealism of his thought distorted by those who claimed
to be his followers? An epic history and riveting biography, Marx’s General at
last brings Engels out from the shadow of his famous friend
and collaborator.
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