Alone amid the Manchester 19th-century “cottonocracy”, Friedrich Engels hoped for the British economy’s collapse and was carefree about losing his fortune forever. That alone would have made him the most extraordinary capitalist. But of course we have a further reason to remember him: Engels and his friend Karl Marx were communists. Together they developed a theory proclaiming the inevitable fall of capitalism; and neither of them would have been as surprised as most of our financial commentators have been by the world economy’s vulnerability to the rapacity and irresponsibility of bankers.

As Tristram Hunt’s excellent book emphasises, Engels was nearly 50 before he left the offices of Ermen & Engels in the north of England and dedicated himself full-time to the revolutionary cause. Born into an industrialist’s family in the Rhineland in 1820, he horrified his parents with his radical beliefs. He took a break from his capitalist functions in the mid-1840s and wrote The Communist Manifesto with Marx. Returning to Germany in 1848 when revolutions broke out in Europe, he saw armed action before their suppression.

He had always been an involuntary factory owner. Without agreeing to tend his German father’s business interests in Manchester he would have lacked the income for himself and Marx to live in the comfort they took as their right. The profligate Marx was constantly on the edge of penury. Engels counted his pennies (or rather his tens of thousands of pounds) more carefully but did not stint in his pleasures. He rode out regularly with the prestigious and costly Cheshire Hounds. He drank wine of quality and ­Pilsner beer in quantity. He treated himself to bevies of young women, including prostitutes. He dressed in fashion.

Engels kept up bourgeois appearances by holding his capitalist and communist lives separate. The frock-coated German industrialist bought a second home in Manchester where he installed his fiery Irish mistress Mary Burns and welcomed his socialist comrades. Mary’s sister Lizzy took her place as his lover when she died. Northern industrialists knew he was a “red” but Engels was discreet about his political and sexual activity and avoided social ostracism. After 1869, when the Ermen brothers bought him out of the business, he moved to London and continued to flourish handsomely through judicious ­investments. He was one of those coupon- ­snipping rentiers that he and Marx subjected to withering contempt in their pamphlets.

Their outlook, being rooted in socio-­economic determinism and philosophical amoralism, inured them to pangs of conscience about the creators of their comfort: the hundreds of Mancunian workers toiling for miserable wages in Engels’s factory that made its patented “Diamond Thread”. Marxism’s co-founders believed that the greater good of humanity was served while they had optimal leisure to elaborate their “correct” theory of communism. Engels was not just a monetary provider for the Marxist cause. Letters ­written between Marx and Engels point to a dynamic partnership, and Hunt defends Engels against the modern charge that he distorted the essence of Marx’s doctrines. Marx always submitted drafts of books such as Das Kapital, which appeared with Marx as sole author, for improvement. When Engels tried to codify Marxism after Marx’s death in 1883, he was only making up for what his chronically indecisive partner sho­uld have done for himself.

Both had always been eager to encourage a broad revolutionary movement against capitalism through­out Europe. But they were ­notorious sectarians, better at squabbling and intriguing than at building organisations. The secrecy of the­ir tiny International Working Men’s Association fooled Europe’s police chiefs into overestimating its practical influence. Marxism was a weak political force until the 1890s, when German socialism gathered mass support and cheered the ageing Engels by adopting Marxist ideology.

Hunt has tested and proved the hypothesis that it is possible to write about Engels without putting the English language through the mangle. In examining the linkages between doctrine, politics and private personality, he argues, moreover, that we should not judge him by anachronistic ­standards. Engels was a man of his times and a lot of his comments on women, homosexuals, Slavs and non-European races would now be thought objectionable. Perhaps, though, the author could have given us a little more on the question of Engels’s ­responsibility for the later oppression in the USSR. Engels did not advocate the establishment of a dictatorial elite to inaugurate the perfect society. But several cardinal features of his thought (amoralism, anti-peasantism, state centralism and pseudo-scientific confidence) were bricks in the pyramid of the ­Soviet order. This is not to deny that if ­Engels, who died in 1895, had lived in Russia after 1917 he would hardly have been likely to escape arrest as a free-thinking communist dissenter.

Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought. The partner who willingly played “second fiddle” to capitalism’s Jeremiah receives his due.

The Frock-Coated Communist by Tristram Hunt
Allen Lane £25 pp464

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