(Marx, Engels, and Marxisms) 1st ed. 2021 Edition
by Terrell Carver (Author)
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. In Terrell Carver’s 30th
anniversary edition of his pioneering biographical study of the ‘junior
partner’ – which still remains the only one to balance Engels’s
pre-Marx, with-Marx, and post-Marx writings, giving a rounded view of
his life and thought – Carver adopts a comparative and critical
approach, neither taking the ‘perfect partnership’ as a given, nor
presuming that all the intellectual fireworks were Marx’s. Engels’s
famously ‘bourgeois’ class position and ‘champagne socialist’ lifestyle
emerge as resolutions rather than contradictions – they provided
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
provides reflections on how politics since the 1990s has brought Marx,
Engels, and Marxisms back to life, and how publication of the
Marx-Engels ‘collected works’ in a definitive edition, and in English
translation, have promoted interpretive innovation. Engels himself did
his best to establish his own biographical narrative. This book enables
readers to assess that dominating view for themselves.
