The Champagne Communist

By RUPERT DARWALL

As double acts go, the names of Marx and ­Engels don't have quite the ring of Bonnie and Clyde or Laurel and Hardy, but ­celebrity wasn't ever the point. Revolution was.

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Friedrich Engels in the 1870s

It is often assumed that Friedrich Engels (1820-95), a prosperous mill owner, was a kind of patron to Karl Marx, and so he proved to be. But he was a formidable thinker in his own right. According to the late Leszek Kolakowski, the ­author of "Main Currents of Marxism," Marx's powers of abstract thought were ­superior, but Engels surpassed Marx at relating theory to ­empirical data. Tristram Hunt's admiring biography of Engels, "Marx's General," goes further to redress the balance, arguing on behalf of Engels's ­intellectual contribution and, along the way, showing him to be a more interesting and ­paradoxical character than the man who ­pioneered the ­mumbo-jumbo of dialectical materialism.

Mr. Hunt depicts a ­laughter-loving Engels, a "joy inspirer" to his friends—the original champagne ­communist. In later life, Engels said that his idea of happiness was a Château Margaux 1848. The year is an important one in non-vintage respects, too—it was the year of Marx and ­Engels's "Communist ­Manifesto" and of the revolutions across Europe that seemed to validate, for a brief moment, its road map to a ­socialist utopia.

At the time, Engels and Marx, who had met years ­before in Paris, were both ­living in Brussels, though soon enough they would end up in England. Born in Germany, ­Engels had spent part of his early 20s in Manchester, and he returned there when the 1848 revolutions failed.

For two decades he helped to run the mills that his family partly owned, sending part of his share of the profits (while helping himself to more) to Marx, who was in London writing "Das Kapital." Engels even hunted foxes with Cheshire's landed gentry, "the greatest physical pleasure I know," as he confessed. Eventually he sold his interest in the ­business to ­become a Victorian rentier, reading The Economist for ­investing tips and deriding the idea, proposed by some, that readers of a socialist ­newspaper should look to it for investment advice. "Anyone who does so will burn his ­fingers, and serve him right."

“Engels also for forty years funded Karl Marx, looked after his children, soothed his furies, and provided one half of history's most celebrated ideological partnership as coauthor of The Communist Manifesto and cofounder of what would come to be known as Marxism.” Read an excerpt from 'Marx's General.'

Mr. Hunt paints ­sympathetic portraits of ­communism's founding circle, enamored of Hegelian ­philosophy and other ideas floating around ­19th-century Europe. We meet, for instance, the colorful Polish aristocrat August von ­Cieszkowski, who turned the hyper-abstract reasoning of German idealism into "praxis," an unlovely word for practical revolutionary activity. Then there is the ex-rabbi ­Moses Hess, "the first communist of the party," who argued that theology was anthropology and that anthropology was ­socialism: in short, that ­communism would bring about heaven on Earth, the ­fulfillment of religion by its negation. Engels had a falling out with Hess and cuckolded him in an act of vengeance, writing to Marx about the ­exquisite sight of Hess ­brandishing his pistols and ­parading his horns before the whole of Brussels.

When Engels first arrived in Manchester, he was astonished to find a working class with, as he put it, "more knowledge than most 'cultivated' ­bourgeois in Germany." But when it came to writing "The Conditions of the Working Class in England" (1844)—­described by Mr. Hunt as a tour de force—Engels ­airbrushed out the "cultivated" aspect of British working-class life. ­Instead he described ­urban ­industrial horror and talked of "the dissolution of mankind into monads."

Not that he ­celebrated the ­pre-industrial peasantry. ­Industrialization, Engels ­conceded, had pulled the ­working class out of a ­vegetative state "not worthy of human beings." By the 1860s, he was flabbergasted to see Manchester's workers electing Tories to represent them in Parliament, although he had previously observed with ­rising dismay that the working class in England was on the way to becoming ­bourgeois.

At times, reading Mr. Hunt's account, one wonders where Engels would have ended up on the ideological color chart without his association with Marx. He went through a phase of feeling vitriolic about the Slavs, even advocating (to quote Mr. Hunt) "a policy of ethnic cleansing in the service of progress and history." In a letter to a German socialist, Engels wrote: "I am enough of an ­authoritarian to regard the ­existence of such aborigines in the heart of Europe as an anachronism." More ­proto-National Socialist than Communist.

Mr. 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. In his preface and epilogue, he turns from historian to polemicist, ­claiming that Marxism, even today, can deepen our ­understanding of the current recession and of globalization's harsh effects. He seems to ­believe, naively, that a creed requiring the abolition of ­private property will not ­require the systematic use, or threat, of violence.

Fortunately for humanity (that is, the part of it living outside university campuses), Marxism is dead as a political force. ­Kolakowski once ­suggested that it was arguably not worth reading the works of a philosopher who never ­suspected himself of ­being a charlatan. Did such a thought ever occur to Engels? It's hard to tell. What can be said is that the ideology that he and Marx left the world ruthlessly crushed any such speculation.