Who was Engels before Marx? Existing accounts of Friedrich Engels often ignore his early life, or read it teleologically as a future-Marxist-on-hold. In the ‘young Engels’ will emerge as a fascinating and precocious character in his own right, with wide-ranging interests, huge ambition and remarkable success. Through careful consideration of Engel's early work and contextual materials written over a decade or so of his early youth, Terrell Carver introduces Engels as gifted as a litterateur, watercolorist, caricaturist, social critic, journalist (widely read in German and in English) and satirist, not to mention rebellious local bad-boy atheist. He was on-trend with the Greek struggle for independence, the Seminole Wars, women’s rights and the anti-slavery movement; he could write about history, technology, working-class politics, small-town hypocrisy, industrial pollution, political economy and current events. 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. weiterlesen