The Skimmer

Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

By Tristram Hunt; Metropolitan Books; 448 pages

Friedrich Engels, the son of a comfortable German family in the textile business who had been sent to work in Manchester, was just 24 when he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England–a brilliant book whose subject would provide the factual underpinning to the analysis of capitalism that Engels and his friend Karl Marx later produced. Hunt, a British historian, details the way Marxism would not have been possible without Engels, an unlikely revolutionary who worked for years as a high-living, foxhunting capitalist to support Marx’s endeavors–Engels’ devotion was such that he even assumed the paternity of an illegitimate child of Marx’s. Hunt shows how factionalism was endemic among 19th century radical groups, nurturing poisonous seeds whose harvest became clear only when communism turned from theory into murderous practice. But he reminds us, too, that Engels’ great work on the misery of early industrial life is enough to explain why communist theory–and revolution–was once so appealing.

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