The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt

Yet whatever the bankers' travails, there exists nowhere a Left or a working class capable of exploiting capitalism's weaknesses to usher in Marx's "realm of freedom". What is interesting about this life of Engels is the light it sheds on why this is so in Western democracies — and was so even before the horrors of the gulag gave his creed a bad name.

The son of a prosperous Rhineland mill owner, Engels's radical streak emerged at university, in the battles of "Young Hegelians" like him with Christian philosophers. These arcane debates are significant not least for their early indication of his love of a sectarian political scrap.

They also led him into a radical career, starting as a contributor to Marx's Rheinische Zeitung, the beginning of their long collaboration. For Engels was a talented journalist, both far more disciplined and a better writer than Marx. Dispatched to Manchester to learn the cotton trade at his family's English mill, he soon began research on his seminal The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). It was to prove crucial to the arguments of The Communist Manifesto (1848), co-authored with Marx.

The irony, as Hunt notes, was that in part such vivid exposés of satanic mills and wretched housing forced the state to temper capitalism's excesses through child labour laws and the flowering of municipal government. As a result, by the time Marx published Volume I of Capital in 1867, the British working class appeared far from revolution. "The English proletariat's revolutionary energy has completely evaporated," grumbled Engels. It was a pattern to be repeated in Western Europe again and again.

Retiring from the hated cotton mill in 1870, Engels moved to London but he faithfully continued to support the Marxes and associated hangers-on for years, as he had done since Marx's arrival in London 21 years earlier.

Hunt engagingly describes their friendship: they lived 10 minutes' walk from each other, meeting almost daily until Marx died in 1883. Engels's house on Primrose Hill became a mecca for European socialists. German Social ..

Democrat Eduard Bernstein told how during riotous evenings, Engels would urge him, "'Drink, young man!' And with these words, in the midst of a violent dispute, he kept on refilling my glass with Bordeaux." How the faction-fighting raged. At the International Workers' Congress in Zurich in 1893, even the grand old man of European socialism tired of the squabbling, sloping off to see his brother. And when the British working class finally rebelled in the 1889 dock strike, it hardly heralded revolution: Keir Hardie, trade union chief and later first Labour leader, rejected Marxism.

Communism's greatest victories — and defeats — were still to come when Engels died in 1895. Hunt is at pains to absolve him of any responsibility for Stalinism. But the idea that Engels's later emphasis on "scientific socialism" led to the unbending Soviet model is far-fetched anyway. His lust for life and his political practice never pointed in such a direction: his world, especially after the failure of the 1871 Paris Commune, was that of the western democratic socialists, more likeable but also more divided and open to compromise than the diamond-hard Lenin and his ruthless Bolsheviks.

Engels, the carousing polymath and generous host of Regents' Park Road, might have given Vladimir Ilyich a drink — but he would surely never have endorsed his harsh worldview..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of "The Communist Manifesto", a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write "Das Kapital". Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels' era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy.Set against the backdrop of revolutionary Europe and industrializing England - of Manchester mills, Paris barricades, and East End strikes - it is a story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal.