ABSTRACT
For the industrial revolution brought into being a quite new social class – the modern working class, and it was this that, more than anything interested Engels. For most writers the ‘industrial revolution’, assuming the term retains any validity, has, especially in the recent past, been reduced to a series of technical changes in the sphere of production; either that, or to a discussion about rates of ‘economic growth’ in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. The Condition is, a general analysis of the development of industrial capitalism and the social impact of that development, the most important feature of which was the emergence of the modern labour movement. In the first place the notion of an ‘industrial revolution’ has been derided as a piece of German Romanticism, a product of the baleful influence exercised over him by Hegel and Moses Hess in particular.
