The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels - Hardcover

Hunt, Tristram

3.92

387 ratings by Goodreads

9780713998528: The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713998520 ISBN 13: 9780713998528

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2009

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Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das Kapital.

Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels's era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy. Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England - of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes - it is a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal.

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The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

Review:

Beautifully written and consistently engaging (Independent)

An excellent book ... Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought (Robert Service Sunday Times)

Thoughtful and engaging (Telegraph Review)

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