Engels before Marx

This book examines the life and works of Friedrich Engels during the decade before he entered a political partnership with Karl Marx. It takes a thematic approach in three substantial chapters: Imagination, Observation, and Vocation. Throughout, the reader sees the world from Engels’s perspective, not knowing how his story will turn out. This approach reveals the multifaceted and ambitious character of young Friedrich’s achievements from age sixteen till just turning twenty-five. At the time that he accepted Marx’s invitation to co-author a short political satire, Engels was far better known and much more accomplished. He had published many more articles on far more subjects, in both German and English, than Marx had managed. Moreover, he had written a critique of political economy from a perspective unique in the German context, and published his own pioneering and substantial study of working class conditions in an industrializing economy. Offering an innovative approach to a largely neglected period of Engels’s life before meeting Marx, Carver upends standard narratives in existing biographical studies of Engels to reveal him as an important figure not just in relation to his more famous collaborator, but a key voice in the liberal-democratic, constitutional and nation-building revolutionism of the 1830s and 1840s.

• Friedrich Engels
• political biography
• Marxism
• Marx
• young Engels
• 19th century
• liberal democracy
• teleology
• liberalism
• Constitutional liberalism
• religion
• Literary politics
• Bruxelles
• Manchester
• revolution
• economic history
• romanticism
• political economy
• Engels
• capitalism

“Carver is very careful to guide us through Engels’ life from 1837 to the edge of 1844 and his meetings with Marx, and that guidance is meticulous for such a brief work. This reviewer humbly suggests in this light that everyone, whether they are general readers or seasoned Marxists, should read and consider what Carver has uncovered about Engels’ early literary life, and ponder the implications within that for his later partnership with Marx, and afterwards.” (Matthew E. Strauss, New Politics, newpol.org, November 28,2020)

• University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

  Terrell Carver

Terrell Carver is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a co-editor of Palgrave's Marx, Engels, and Marxisms series, and is widely published in this area. His recent publications include a two-volume study of “The German Ideology” manuscripts with Daniel Blank (Palgrave, 2014).

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