Dimensions
165 x 240 x 42mm
Friedrich Engels was a textile magnate and fox-hunter, member of the Manchester Royal Exchange and president of the city's Schiller Institute. He was a raffish, high-living, heavy drinking devotee of the good things in life: lobster salad, Château Margaux, Pilsner beer, and expensive women.
But Engels also for forty years funded Karl Marx, looked after his children, soothed his furies, and provided one half of history's most celebrated ideological partnership: co-author of The Communist Manifesto and co-founder of what would come to be known as Marxism.
Over the course of the twentieth century, from Chairman Mao's China to the Stasi state of the GDR, from the anti-imperial struggle in Africa and the Soviet Union itself, various manifestations of this compelling philosophy would cast their shadow over a full third of the human race. And as often as not, the leadership of the socialist world would look first to Engels rather than Marx to explain their policies, justify their excesses and shore up their regimes.
Interpreted and misinterpreted, quoted and misquoted, Friedrich Engels – the frock-coated Victorian cotton lord – became one of the central architects of global communism.
