The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels

The natural price of labor is a concept used by 19th Century political economists as different as David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Photo by Rob Ward (Flickr: HayFestivalA-011.jpg), via Wikimedia Commons. In 2003 he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 'for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of twentieth-century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent.'īio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. He was President of Birkbeck, University of London from 2002 until his death. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family, then obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge before serving in the Second World War. Hobsbawm was born in Egypt but spent his childhood mostly in Vienna and Berlin. His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the 'long 19th century' (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914), The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of 'invented traditions'. Also included are notes, a detailed index, new chronology and further reading and a revised forward.Įric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH FRSL FBA (/ˈhɒbz.bɔːm/ 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism, and nationalism. Based on the original translation by Florence Wischnewetzky, this volume is edited by Victor Kiernan, whose foreword considers Engels’s friendship with Marx, and the book’s position as a seminal work of socialism. A masterpiece of committed reporting and an impassioned call to arms, this is one of the great pioneering works of social history. His fascinating later preface, written for the first English edition of 1892 and included here, brought the story up to date in the light of forty years’ further reflection.

Engels paints an unforgettable picture of daily life in the new industrial towns, and for miners and agricultural workers-depicting overcrowded housing, abject poverty, child labour, sexual exploitation, dirt and drunkenness-in a savage indictment of the greed of the bourgeoisie. Written when Engels was only twenty-four, and inspired in particular by his time living among the poor in Manchester, this forceful polemic explores the staggering human cost of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England.

The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels