(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.
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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.”
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