Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt

(Metropolitan, 430 pages, $32)

Friedrich Engels has been un­deservedly “airbrushed from history,” says historian Tristram Hunt. Though his name is ritually invoked in any discussion of Marxism’s origins, the man and his pioneering ideas are easily forgotten. Far from a self-serious revolutionary, this talented son of a German thread manufacturer was a “high-living, heavy-drinking devotee of the good things in life,” and a selfless friend to boot. Two years after he and Karl Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto, Engels strapped himself once more to the family business—so that his income could sustain Marx’s writing. “Beastly,” he called the work. But he stuck to it for 20 years, quitting only after Marx had finished the first volume of Das Kapital.

Hunt’s deft new biography “makes a good case” for giving the class traitor more credit, said The Economist. Though Engels was content to play second fiddle to his friend Karl, his own gifts were evident from an early age. While serving in the German military in Berlin, he became excited by the ideas of G.W.F. Hegel. He took those ideas with him when his family installed him as an executive at its thread operation in Manchester, England. Engels deplored what industrialization was doing to workers’ lives. “By 1845, when he was just 24, he had not only learnt how to be a successful capitalist; he had also written a coruscatingly anti-capitalist work,” The Condition of the Working Class in England. It became Marx’s intellectual cornerstone.

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Hunt is “remarkably good at distilling an epoch,” said Rupert Darwall in The Wall Street Journal. He also shows Engels to have been “a more interesting and paradoxical character” than Marx. In fact, Hunt is “so successful” at portraying Engels as “a jovial man of outsize appetites” that his defense of Engels’ intellectual achievements feels comparatively thin, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. What was it about the writing of Engels and Marx that inspired all the “calumnies” that were later committed in their names? “A more penetrating examination of this question might have made Marx’s General an excellent book instead of merely a good one.”