Art and Ambiguity: The Politics of Friedrich Engels

Abstract

In writing an intellectual biography of Friedrich Engels, I hypothesized that a careful examination of his youthful oeuvre would help to explain certain puzzles and inconsistencies in his later life. My investigation of this period exposed two areas of ambiguity: First, in considering his early ventures into art, and his youthful opinions about it, the biographer confronts inherent ambiguities of interpretation. Second, modern readers necessarily experience ambiguities in their own reactions when they examine some of the romantic imagery used by the young Engels, as it is now evocative of fascism, rather than democracy, as he intended. In conclusion I list the political questions raised by my study.