The concept of classes in early work of F. Engels

Abstract

In 2020 the scientific community celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels with numerous publications, conferences, and meetings. But as if by tradition representatives of various social and humanitarian disciplines, including sociologists, were and remain to this day, surprisingly inattentive (or indifferent) to the concepts of classes and class analysis presented by the founder of Marxism in his first book «The Condition of the Working Class in England», published in 1845. Modern life writers of F. Engels usually rank the work as a genre of high-quality journalistic investigations, as an engaged political journalism, as the first publications on the problem of urbanization, and as one of the best examples of a fiction book about the life and customs of the Victorian era. The article substantiates its belonging to the social and humanitarian science in accordance with today’s ideas about the relevance of scientific research. A sociological explication and interpretation of the views on the formation, evolution and prospects for the participation of large groups of people in the process of transforming social orders are proposed. The first part presents the biographical context of Engels’ writing of his first major work, as well as some post-biographical facts about the memory of his stay in Manchester in connection with the living conditions of English workers. The second part lists those conceptual constructs that can be taken for the concept of classes.