Description
Book SynopsisThis edited volume presents an interdisciplinary and international revaluation of Friedrich Engels as much more than “junior partner” to Karl Marx or “second fiddle” in the Marxist orchestra. The nineteen critical essays in this collection are the work of scholars from Germany, USA, UK, Italy, China, India, Mexico and the Philippines. Together they present and evaluate archival material and scholarly commentary that covers epistemology, political economy, political theory, gender studies, cultural studies, political geography, philosophy of social science and sociological studies of class-conflict. Students, activists and specialists will find fresh consideration of familiar works, such as The Condition of the Working Class in England, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and The Dialectics of Nature. They will also be able to explore Engels’s less familiar pamphleteering, literary criticism and political commentary through detailed contextualization and careful analysis. Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems is unique in putting different intellectual and political receptions of Engels’s work into productive conversation, particularly from non-Anglophone scholars, translated here into English. Readers will appreciate why Engels has been so widely celebrated some two hundred years after his birth.
Table of ContentsChapter One: Introduction.- Section 1 Epistemology and Philosophy of Nature.- Chapter Two: Engels and the dialectic of nature.- Chapter Three: Engels and the “Dialectics of Nature”.- Chaper Four: Was Engels a dialectical materialist?.- Chapter Five: Engels and the end of philosophy.- Section 2 Political Economy.- Chapter Six: Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: the is/ought question.- Chapter Seven: The young Engels and the critique of capitalism: his influence on the young Marx.- Chapter Eight: Engels on the „external market“ and „de-industrialization“.- Section 3 The Condition of the Working Class.- Chapter Nine: The constitution of the proletariat: bringing together Friedrich Engels, Edward P. Thompson and Michael Vester.- Chapter Ten: The Housing Question Revisited.- Section 4 Theorizing Power.- Chapter Eleven: Engels theorizes gender hierarchy in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.- Chapter Twelve: The concept of power in Engels’s theory of the state.- Chapter Thirteen Re-reading Engels in the twenty-first century: state, nationalism, and internationalism.- Section 5 Engels and Literature.- Chapter Fourteen: The proletariat and the „people“: Engels and the „social prose“ of the 1840s.- Chapter Fifteen: Engels’s philosophical mock-epic: The Triumph of Faith.- Chapter Sixteen: Engels and German literature: a political history to the present.- Section 6 Emancipation – Revolution – Communism.- Chapter Seventeen: Engels on post-capitalist society: continuity or discontinuity with Marx.- Chapter Eighteen Engels and the remaking of communism in the twenty-first century.- Chapter Nineteen: Afterword: whither Engels?
