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Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels Hardcover – August 18, 2009

by Tristram Hunt (Author)

4.6 45 ratings

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A remarkable new biography from one of Britain’s leading young historians that recovers the co-founder of communism from the shadows of history

Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-class existence of a Victorian gentleman.
Yet Engels was also, with Karl Marx, the founder of international communism, which in the twentieth century came to govern one-third of the human race. He was the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so that Marx could write Das Kapital. His searing account of the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and brutal indictments of the human costs of capitalism. Far more than Marx’s indispensable aide, Engels was a profound thinker in his own right—on warfare, feminism, urbanism, Darwinism, technology, and colonialism. With fierce clarity, he predicted the social effects of today’s free-market fundamentalism and unstoppable globalization.
Drawing on a wealth of letters and archives, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt plumbs Engels’s intellectual legacy and shows us how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his exuberant personal life with his radical political philosophy. Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England—of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes—Marx’s General tells a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal. And it tackles head-on the question of Engels’s influence: was Engels, after Marx’s death, responsible for some of the most devastating turns of twentieth-century history, or was the idealism of his thought distorted by those who claimed to be his followers?
An epic history and riveting biography, Marx’s General at last brings Engels out from the shadow of his famous friend and collaborator.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. With strong scholarship in Marxist history and theory, a fluent style and some healthy doses of irony, Hunt (Building Jerusalem) traces the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto from his pious Prussian roots through his apprenticeship in the family textile firm in Manchester, England, early years at the forefront of revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe and his subsequent return to the family industry to support Marx's family and writing. Engels is characterized as a gregarious yet committed theorist and activist, providing considerable financial and intellectual resources to Marx while accepting his own role as second fiddle in their joint battle for socialist ideological dominance. Though the book makes a strong case for the value of Engels's own writings on working conditions and defends against reductive readings that would align him with the rigid orthodoxies of Leninism and Stalinism, the author is clear-eyed with regard to Engels's less savory, sometimes deeply chilling ideas and his divisive manipulations of organizations and party politics. This is an impressive biography of a fascinating figure whose attempts to synthesize his own contradictory roles as arch-capitalist and seminal communist, embody the very notion of dialectics so central to Marxist theory. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

“It all began over drinks,” Hunt writes of the forty-year collaboration between Karl Marx and his benefactor, ghostwriter, and best friend, Friedrich Engels. Engels’s life was defined by an awkward tension. When he could afford it, he was a muckraking journalist, street-fighting revolutionary, and international libertine. When he couldn’t, he was tethered to Manchester and his father’s cotton mill, supplying Marx with the money (and the empirical evidence) he needed to complete “Das Kapital.” This greatly enjoyable biography of “the original champagne communist” is a perceptive tour not just through Engels’s life but through philosophy and political thought in the nineteenth century, though it will inevitably be read through the lens of the twentieth. Engels saw the existence of the Slavs “in the heart of Europe as an anachronism,” at once indicating a low opinion of the people who would first embrace Marxism and hinting at the pitiless path Communism later took.

Review

“Greatly enjoyable... A perceptive tour not just through Engels’s life but through philosophy and political thought in the nineteenth century.”—The New Yorker “Brilliant.”—The Economist “A vivid and thoughtful biography... Hunt artfully flushes out Engels’s human side.”—The New York Times

“Hunt is remarkably good at distilling an epoch and conveying a sense of place, and he perfectly judges the pace of his narrative, illustrating what he is saying without burdening the reader with detail best left in the archives.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“A splendid biography… Hunt’s vivid prose captures Engels’s idealism, generosity and foibles. That is to say, it makes him recognizably human.”

—The Plain Dealer “Written with brio, warmth, and historical understanding, this is more than the best biography of one of the most attractive inhabitants of Victorian England, Karl Marx’s friend, partner, and political heir. It is also one of the most accessible and persuasive studies of how the arguments of young philosophers in the 1840s grew into the movement that shook and changed the world in the twentieth century.”
—Eric Hobsbawm, author of The Age of Revolution and The Age of Extremes “Vivid and sharply observed… Tristram Hunt brings to the fore the extraordinary pressures which shaped Engels’s personality and made him a virtuoso of the double life. In this novel and refreshing account, Engels is at last freed from the condescension of posterity.”
—Gareth Stedman Jones, author of Outcast London “Does an excellent job of bringing Engels out from the shadow of the man he served so devotedly.”
—Alan Ryan, The Literary Review (UK) “A splendid, gripping biography… Tristram Hunt’s witty, humane and sharp-eyed portrait of Engels does justice to the complex chemistry of the relationship with Marx, but also sets the ‘junior partner’ at the centre of his own life and intellectual evolution.”
—Christopher Clark, Standpoint (UK) “Excellent… The partner who willingly played ‘second fiddle’ to capitalism’s Jeremiah receives his due.”
—Robert Service, The Sunday Times (UK)

About the Author

Tristram Hunt is a lecturer in history at the University of London. The author of Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, he writes political and cultural commentary for The Guardian, The Times, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Metropolitan Books (August 18, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805080252
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805080254
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.7 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,986,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,527 in Philosopher Biographies

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4.6 45 ratings

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Jay C. Smith

The junior partner?

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2009

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Marx's General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
The collaborative friendship of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx is surely among the most remarkable in all of history. Engels is generally perceived as the junior partner and he readily acknowledged that "Marx stood higher, saw further, and took a wider and quicker view than all the rest of us." But the most notable aspect of their relationship might be how much it depended on Engels' personal sacrifices and generosity, both material and intellectual.

As this fine biography of Engels documents, Engels bankrolled Marx; originated certain seminal socialist ideas; co-wrote, edited, and translated various publications issued under Marx's name; acted as Marxism's chief political operative and publicist; fulfilled the role of a close "uncle" to Marx's daughters; and even took on the responsibility for the paternity of Marx's illegitimate son.

Hunt does an especially good job of setting the intellectual context in which the ideas of Engels and Marx developed and matured. He succinctly summarizes Engels' reactions to Hegel, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Hess, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, Carlyle, Owen, and the Chartists, for example. He also captures well the continental politics of the 1840s and the roles Engels played in the revolutionary events of 1848-49.

Between 1850 and 1870 Engels was a junior partner in the family textile firm of Ermen & Engels in Manchester, where he lived a life of contradictions. He earned a good income and was an outwardly respectable member of the local merchant establishment, a fox hunter and an attendee of society events, but he also welcomed a business crash in textiles as a boost for socialism, sometimes put his hand in the till to get money to send to Marx, and co-habited with a working-class paramour.

Hunt is able to provide only a little insight into whatever inner tension Engels may have felt regarding his two worlds. He alludes to illness and depression, but gives no details. Engels correspondence with Marx refers to the tedium of his job in "vile commerce," and we know that when he left he finally felt himself a "free man."

Marx's General is helpful in sorting out Engels' intellectual contributions from those of Marx. Engels' own Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), based on an early sojourn to Manchester, is itself something of a classic (though an imperfect one). Through that work and others one can trace to Engels several key themes and ideas that became part of the mainstream of Marxist thought.

Engels was generous and intellectually talented, but we learn that he also had his faults. For instance, apparently he could be something of a bully to his workers and he was often a relentless ad hominem attacker of ideological opponents in the internecine quarrels among activists on the left. He shared in the racism of his times, though he generally opposed racist forces in politics.

Various critics have indicted Engels as the source of certain of the more objectionable rigidities of subsequent communist ideology, but Hunt stresses that Engels was flexible and re-thought his positions over time as conditions changed. He cannot be held responsible for the subsequent terrible deeds of communist regimes, Hunt claims -- Engels was too much a believer in individuality, culture, and the good life to have gone along with Soviet communism .

Intended or not, the overall impression Hunt creates here is that without Engels there would be no Marxism as we know it, that Engels was an equal partner, not a subordinate one.

29 people found this helpful

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Constant Reader

Learned something on every page

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2013

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This is an absolutely riveting dual biography of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that is beautifully written with some fine touches of ironic humor. I'm in awe of Tristram Hunt's achievement. This book didn't get enough attention when it was published here in the states (the author is a young Brit) and I can't figure out why. It's got everything you want to know about a famous friendship that altered the course of history.

Especially interesting to me, because I knew nothing about it, was Engels's and Marx's fascination with Darwin's theory of evolution and their abiding belief that human society would inevitably evolve in a similar "scientific" fashion. I always wondered where the odd belief in dialectical materialism as a "science" sprang from--- now I know.

Also odd: Engels, a polymath intellectual, invariably chose illiterate workingclass women as his sexual partners and closest female intimates. Despite his evident fear of intellectual women of his own class (what else could it have been but fear?), he wrote "The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and the State," a pretty good analysis of female oppression for its time.

My one big quibble with Hunt is that his citation system uses the definitive edition of Marx and Engels's works, which tells me nothing about when a particular work was first published.

I bought this book simultaneously with Frances Wheen's negligible biography of Marx that was touted by Christopher Hitchens. Forget Wheen (another young Brit). If you want to learn about Marx and Engels and the times they lived in, read "Marx's General".

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Lawlor Wm. Lee

Leftist Intellect, Business Man, Party Animal, Man of Action, Loyal Buddy and Perhaps a Bit of a cad

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2011

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Hunt provides us with a complex portrayal of a really multifaceted man He comes across as one part intellectual and brilliant writer, one part man of action, one part loyal friend, one part "true believer", and one part, cad. There are other parts too, he must have been a talented businessman and his capacity for alcohol, as portrayed by Hunt, seemed amazing.
The book was written with solid but not overwhelming scholarship. I'm no expert but from the bits and pieces of my reading in Marxist history and theory he seems to know his stuff (better than I do at any rate). The book reads well thanks to a nicely fluent style and some healthy doses of irony. It traces Engels from his pious Prussian roots through his apprenticeship in the family textile firm in Manchester, early years at the forefront of revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe and his subsequent return to the family industry to support Marx and his family. Engels is characterized by Hunt as a gregarious yet committed theorist and activist - he actually participated in some of the shooting in 1848 and became a bit of an expert on military strategy - providing considerable, and we suspect essential, financial and intellectual resources to Marx while accepting his own role as "second fiddle" in the joint struggle for socialist ideological dominance. In this sense it seemed that they did as much or probably more fighting with their co-socialists than with the forces of reaction. Hunt is clear with regard to Engels's less savory, sometimes deeply chilling ideas, his divisive manipulations of organizations and party politics, not to mention the lousy way he could treat former friends and mentors was hardly commendable. Still it is hard to not be impressed by his passion for the cause of the oppressed, his writing skills and his approach to learning, no significant area of the human condition escaped his interest..
Engels who outlived his friend and collaborator spent his last years, not only as a international socialist guru but a kind of pater families to the Marx sisters and their less then sterling partners. He had become a no less committed socialist but one more prepared to listen to alternative strategies (to violence) to its establishment. In 1895 he died of esophageal cancer at the age of 74. His doctor at the time wouldn't tell him of the disease or of prognosis. But being a person so interested in science he probably had a pretty good idea of what was wrong and that it wouldn't end well. All the same he seems to have faced it with grace and dignity.
The book makes a strong case for the value of Engels's own writings on working conditions and in a spirited end section acquits him of the charges that aligned him with the rigid orthodoxies of Leninism and Stalinism, etc In the end however Engels emerges as someone with a clear eyed understanding of the evils of unbridled capitalism. Surely we could use some his passion and perceptive analysis in our present circumstances.

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Amazon Customer

Very readable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 28, 2023

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Very good general work - theory maybe needed more

Redmond

Un portrait nuancé qui n'esquive pas les contradictions d'Engels

Reviewed in France on July 12, 2021

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Un riche industriel, businessman et manager avisé qui a entretenu Marx et sans qui le Capital n'aurait pu être écrit, un révolutionnaire amateur de cigares, de vins fins, de chasse à courre et de jolies femmes, un ami et collaborateur fidèle --mais dont la réflexion politique est sensiblement différente de celle de Marx, l'auteur de cette biographie révèle des facettes inattendues de la personne et de l'analyse d'Engels, loin de la statufication partisane, et révèle l'être humain derrière l'image politique conventionnelle.

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Cornelius ten Teye

Lesenswert

Reviewed in Germany on July 26, 2018

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Sehr gut recherchierte Biografie von Friedrich Engels. Am besten hat mir das Nachwort gefallen, das die Verhältnisse, die Engels 1840 in Wuppertal vorfand , mit dem heutigen kommunistischen China vergleicht.

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wolfstetter

Superb book

Reviewed in Germany on January 25, 2015

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This is a most enjoyable biography that puts the life of Engels into a broad perspective of the intellectual movements and confusions of the time. Very well written, lively, insightful, educated. A rare pleasure to read.

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