As a work of history The Peasant War in Germany contains some flaws. Expressing his belief that Thomas Müntzer, a radical supporter of the peasants' overthrow of all feudal structures, was ahead of his time and therefore doomed to defeat, Engels can use language that ignores subtle historical difference.[7] Depending on the historians' own perspective, the war could be interpreted, as Friedrich Engels does, as a case in which an emerging bourgeoisie (the urban class) failed to assert a sense of its own autonomy in the face of princely power, and left the rural classes to their fate.[8]