Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction: Hegelianism, Republicanism, and Modernity
- 1 Eduard Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional Debate
- 2 Ludwig Feuerbach's Critique of Religion and the End of Moral Philosophy
- 3 The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Left Hegelianism
- 4 Exclusiveness and Political Universalism in Bruno Bauer
- 5 Republican Rigorism and Emancipation in Bruno Bauer
- 6 Edgar Bauer and the Origins of the Theory of Terrorism
- 7 Ein Menschenleben: Hegel and Stirner
- 8 ‘The State and I’: Max Stirner's Anarchism
- 9 Engels and the Invention of the Catastrophist Conception of the Industrial Revolution
- 10 The Basis of the State in the Marx of 1842
- 11 Marx and Feuerbachian Essence: Returning to the Question of ‘Human Essence’ in Historical Materialism
- 12 Freedom and the ‘Realm of Necessity’
- 13 Work, Language, and Community: A Response to Hegel's Critics
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Engels and the Invention of the Catastrophist Conception of the Industrial Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction: Hegelianism, Republicanism, and Modernity
- 1 Eduard Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional Debate
- 2 Ludwig Feuerbach's Critique of Religion and the End of Moral Philosophy
- 3 The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Left Hegelianism
- 4 Exclusiveness and Political Universalism in Bruno Bauer
- 5 Republican Rigorism and Emancipation in Bruno Bauer
- 6 Edgar Bauer and the Origins of the Theory of Terrorism
- 7 Ein Menschenleben: Hegel and Stirner
- 8 ‘The State and I’: Max Stirner's Anarchism
- 9 Engels and the Invention of the Catastrophist Conception of the Industrial Revolution
- 10 The Basis of the State in the Marx of 1842
- 11 Marx and Feuerbachian Essence: Returning to the Question of ‘Human Essence’ in Historical Materialism
- 12 Freedom and the ‘Realm of Necessity’
- 13 Work, Language, and Community: A Response to Hegel's Critics
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Frederick Engels' Condition of the Working-Class in England records his twenty-one-month residence in Lancashire and was published in Leipzig in 1845. For at least one century, it has been celebrated as one of the great set-piece descriptions of the horrors of the “industrial revolution.” It has also been recognised by urban sociologists and historians as providing in its depiction of Manchester a classic account of the nineteenth-century industrial town. This claim was strongly emphasised by Engels himself at the point where he began his description of Manchester. He wrote of entering
upon that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved its masterwork and from which all labour movements emanate … In Lancashire and especially Manchester, English manufacture finds at once its starting-point and its centre … The modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester … The effects of modern manufacture upon the working class must necessarily develop here most freely and perfectly, and the manufacturing proletariat present itself in its fullest classic perfection. The degradation to which the application of steam power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the working man and the attempts of the proletariat to rise above this abasement must likewise be carried to the highest point and with the fullest consciousness. Hence because Manchester is the classic type of a modern manufacturing town, and because I know it as intimately as my own native town, more intimately than most of its residents know it, we shall make a longer stay here!
It is the evidence of Engels' intimate acquaintance with Manchester that singles out his description from those of so many of his contemporaries.
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- The New HegeliansPolitics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, pp. 200 - 219Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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