Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought was first published thirty years ago in 1990. This anniversary edition—freshly titled The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels—marks the bicentenary of Engels’s birth being commemorated across the world in 2020. In that light I offer some remarks about the book in context, giving today’s readers a sense of the life and thought through which the book arose. The last ten years or so have witnessed some dramatic changes in the political and intellectual context through which Engels has come alive again, so to speak. The world has changed, and so has he. Scholarship has provided a wealth of new materials, but more importantly the whole idea of what to look for, how to present it and why it matters has altered substantially. The observations below will bear witness, as the discussion unfolds, to how useful Engels has been in raising questions that trouble long-standing historical judgements. The present doesn’t sit still, so why should the past?
Way Back When
In the mid-1980s my gentlemanly editor at The Macmillan Press Ltd. was Tim Farmiloe, based in literary London. He was very supportive of my academic and entrepreneurial ambitions, using the first-class letter-post, typed-up text and autograph-signature methods of the time. Rather remarkably I recently retrieved the signed contract and correspondence from what I realized was a personal archive. These piles of files have all the signs of things ‘left where they landed’, not unlike some of the archives I’ve had access to over the years.
In the mid-1980s the book was conceived as something of a companion-in-spirit to David McLellan’s much larger scholarly biography Karl Marx : His Life and Thought. That book was published by Macmillan, hence my overture to his publisher, though it had come out some years before in 1973. McLellan’s biography caught the crest of the post-1968 wave of student-driven interest, already stoked by his series of paperback Marx-studies, also published by Macmillan. These had begun in 1969 with his reworked D.Phil. thesis on the Young Hegelians and Karl Marx. I bought the inexpensive and colourful books as they came out, and they made a nice little collection on the shelf. The pop-art covers mimicked Andy Warhol’s 1968 repetitions of Alberto Korda’s iconic Che Guevara photo of 1960. Those were the days.
With the full-scale biography of Marx, as a contemporary reviewer remarked, McLellan had reached his ‘Finland Station’. At the time many readers would have caught the reference there to Lenin’s history-making arrival in St Petersburg in 1917 and to Edmund Wilson’s classic of that title, first published in 1940 and still in print today. Wilson’s ‘Study in the Writing and Acting of History’ was for many years a standard introduction to the great revolutions and great ideas version of history. For students in liberal arts programmes it was an intellectual landmark, hence required reading, as it was for me, an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, 1964–8.
McLellan’s full-length biography similarly became standard reading for much the same reasons, and in a vein pioneered by his supervisor at Oxford University, Isaiah Berlin. Berlin’s first published work was a short, biographical study in 1939, Karl Marx : His Life and Environment—note the subtitle mimicry going on here. Berlin’s was the first scholarly treatment in English of the then Soviet—and earlier Bolshevik—supposed founding father. The book, originally published in a London-based Home University Library, is now in its 5th edition and has never been out of print. And rather similarly, McLellan’s biography, updated in 1995, has joined the ranks of standard works.
So by the later 1980s the admixture of ideas with history, and the vision of intellectuals as history-makers, was already well established. It was also possible by then to consider the life and thought of a highly politicized, and famously contentious, figure of the past ‘in context’, rather than as immediately toxic. Remember that in the mid- and even late 1980s no one had any evidence-based theory, or even very credible supposition, that the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself, would collapse so spectacularly.
Thus at that point, and in impeccably academic settings, with Marx we had a man of ideas, indeed revolutionary ones, without which—so it was argued—we couldn’t really understand the mass political turbulence of the twentieth century: world wars, communist wars, cold wars, ideological wars. The common point of origin for these studies was the French Revolution of 1789–95, from which came many of the political ideas that had activated Marx.
These were also the ideas that activated the histories through which Berlin, Wilson, McLellan and many others understood their later times. However bumpy and uneven the contradictions and cataclysms, from the revolutionary wars of 1790s to the Iron Curtain of the 1950s through to the 1980s, Marx’s thought was an obvious and necessary first step for anglophones in understanding Marxism.
Marx and Marxism
This understanding of Marxism as a historical topic worked in two ways. There were hostile treatments that saw little if any good in the ideas, and only subversion and destruction in self-styled ‘Marxist’ regimes. And there were sympathetic treatments that found some virtues in at least some of Marx’s ideas, if not in most or sometimes any ‘Marxist’ political practices. The political salience of Marxism provided the opportunity for intellectuals to explore such writings as were then available, taking advantage—from the 1950s—of deliberately cheap Soviet/East German editions and translations. And after ‘the fall of the [Berlin] wall’ in late 1989, they were even cheaper.
Rather fortunately for these academic, intellectual enterprises, there was relatively little to say about Marx’s own record in hands-on political practice, since that was not where and how he made his name in his lifetime. Marx was a revolutionary of the pen, a journalist, pamphleteer, political economist and prolific correspondent. It was thus rather hard to praise or blame him for uprisings and regime-changes, massacres and murders, political progress or regress, in any very direct way—though some very lengthy studies rose to the challenge. Alternatively those who saw him as a politically potent great revolutionary, precisely because of his great ideas, had to say—as they did at length—just how this worked, that is, how Marx’s ideas were ‘translated’ into notable actions by others.
One central European intellectual in particular enabled academic writers to rise over and above, rather than staying strictly within, the polarizing political terms of the time. Karl Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie of 1929 became, in a translation of 1936, a classic in anglophone sociology of knowledge, not least because it gave an objective neutrality to the study of contentious political topics and eponymous political contenders. Marx thus became a ‘life’ to be recovered and his thought became an ‘ideology’. Society became an ongoing arena of ideas, linking individuals to politics, generating systems not just events, posing puzzles in intellectual terms and needing intellectuals to unravel them. Mannheim’s book, or at least the framing idea of ‘ideology’, was also on my liberal arts curriculum, where great men, great ideas and great events were the stuff of survey courses. And Marx also fitted the utopianizing aspect of ideas-in-action that Mannheim drew attention to.
Thus to unravel the puzzling imbrications of incendiary words and ubiquitous gunfire in Europe post-1917, and succeeding decades of ideological warfare, we needed specialists in the history of ideas, that is, intellectuals who weren’t exactly philosophers and weren’t exactly historians. And to make the enterprise go, we needed biographers to provide the narrative arc: birth and family, youthful ambitions and scrapes, slings and arrows of fortune, great works and recognition (or lack of it) and life-after-death in posthumous publication and reception. McLellan’s work has stood the test, and is only recently succeeded in the genre by Gareth Stedman Jones’s Karl Marx : Greatness and Illusion, published in 2016, at something like twice the length. While not the only biography of Marx published in the intervening period, by any means, this is the one that best fits the mould as a history of ideas by a highly qualified intellectual in a suitably large, ‘door-stop’-size volume.
Looking Over My Shoulder
My own biographical study of Engels wasn’t conceived on that scale or in quite that way. The publishers didn’t seem to mind the differences in size and scope from McLellan’s, or the mimicry involved in the subtitle. In a generous, though not uncritical review, McLellan didn’t comment on the coat-tails ploy with ‘His Life and Thought’. The book was somewhat rebellious, with a self-consciously Germanizing ‘Friedrich’ in the title, rather than the more anglicizing ‘Frederick’. He appeared that way in most English-language editions and selections of his works, almost always published in conjunction with Marx’s.
Even in the then rare exceptions to this rule Engels is always stalked by Marx’s spectre, and together in English translations the two became rather thoughtlessly anglicized. In those English words that they came to speak, they have contributed a number of stock quotes and phrases to the language—sometimes via mistranslation and misattribution, for example the ‘spectre’ that ‘haunts’, ‘all that is solid melts into air’, social existence ‘determines’ consciousness, ‘withering away of the state’ and so on. For me, however, this easy familiarity often helped to erase the context that, so I thought, good historians of ideas, and therefore good political theorists, should be aiming for.
In other ways my biographical study didn’t sit easily alongside further intellectual biographies of the time. W.O. Henderson’s two-volume biography of Engels, published in 1976, was then on the library shelves wherever I went. It seemed rather pointless to go over that much detail, given that the source materials a decade later were very much the same. Henderson’s volumes were angled in line with biographical expectations towards the later Engels, which is the usual way that intellectual biographies explain great persons and their times to readers. Few biographical subjects arrive at their fame in their earliest days, just as—at least prior to family photography—few ‘great men’ and (via misogyny, far fewer) ‘great women’ lend us portraits or images from their youth. Moreover archival materials increase exponentially with age, usually, and Engels is no exception. He really got into his stride, quantitatively speaking, only in the 1870s when he joined the over-50s.
Engels retired at age 49 from his day-job as a Manchester-based businessman, reluctantly but lucratively employed at his family’s overseas textile enterprise, and then handsomely pensioned off. After that move to London he got into a revitalized career working on Marx-like projects and political schemes, publicizing his friend very fulsomely and then carrying on mightily after Marx’s death in 1883. As literary executor he was, perforce, curating his own archive of publications and correspondence, handing the boxes on in 1895 via his will to his literary executors. These were Marx’s daughter Eleanor together with long-time socialist confrères August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein. Henderson was thus not short of materials, thanks to the efforts of German socialists who had saved vast quantities of papers from the Nazis, and of later Soviet and East German scholars and archivists who kept or located many other relevant items.
What’s New?
Why not do something different and out-of-the-box? By the mid-1970s the English-language Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels was just underway, edited in conjunction with the revived Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (‘Complete Works’). This huge undertaking was jointly produced between the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in Moscow and the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in East Berlin. Studying the revolutionary thought of foundational communists was a bit of a thrill at the time, though quite safely done at Oxford University, where such enquiries represented just one project in intellectual history among many others.
I was thus enjoying the heritage of Berlin’s work—he was still in residence at All Souls College. And I was following, albeit unknowingly so, in McLellan’s footsteps, but in a different college and with a different supervisor. Moreover my D.Phil. study was methodological, looking to see what was new about Marx in the so-called Grundrisse manuscripts, then untranslated into English and only available in a post-war West German reprint of the very rare wartime double volume. Contextualizing the past meant exactly that as an academic enterprise, which is what I was doing. Studying the contemporary politics of the Cold War was something else. And those taking Marxism into the class wars of 1970s Britain were something else yet again. Sometimes all three crossed over in Balliol College’s common rooms.
Remarkably, and fortunately for me, publication of the first volumes of the Collected Works in the mid-1970s preceded the early volumes of the MEGA2 series, as the post-war revival of the Gesamtausgabe project was generally known. This latter series was directed towards publishing original-language transcriptions, corresponding to the languages of the original works and letters, which were not always in German.
And MEGA2 was variorum, that is, establishing copy-texts and genealogical stemmata with great care and erudition-to-the-letter, right down to the watermarked paper. The published text-of-the-last hand (i.e. the author’s final intention at the point of publication, or last state of a manuscript work) was framed with historical guidance on earlier manuscripts and/or later published editions, and presented with admirable thoroughness. The differences, or ‘variants’, were signalled telegraphically line-by-line in a separate volume of apparatus criticus, as per scholarly method and bibliographical science. And it included third-party letters to Marx or Engels, not just the Marx-Engels interchanges.
Obviously that scholarly process would take a long time per text per volume, and the MEGA2 volumes didn’t come out in a particularly orderly way. But what was fresh in print by the mid-1980s were materials from Engels’s youthful career, previously overlooked as self-evidently unremarkable. The relevant English-language volumes in the Collected Works dated already from 1975, and were based to an extent on the ongoing scholarship of the MEGA2 teams. The relevant MEGA2 volumes date from about a decade later, which was just in time for some fact- and translation-checking by me.
The English-language volumes, in the early days of the project, were thus somewhat ahead of the definitive, variorum treatment, but notably benefiting from pre-publication researches. These had collected up texts quite thoroughly in rigorous chronology, rather than very selectively in order to make a handy canon, as with previous English-language collections. And the new volumes provided historical information in readable, highlighting modes, and most importantly, the full correspondence between the two great men as collected to date. Unusually, and most usefully, it provided very full indexing.
The previous set of German-language Marx-Engels-Werke volumes, highly visible on university library shelves, dated from the 1950s, and is still in use today, given that the MEGA2 project is incomplete. But that series was quite light—as an East German artefact—on the ‘early’ Engels. In this rather large 39-volume set of works and letters the important author was Marx, and the important texts and ideas were ‘known-knowns’ about him in relation to Marxism. But ‘known-knowns’ were not what interested me. Nonetheless in the mid-1980s the Werke volumes were the only readily available source for German-language texts of most works by Ma...