The Frock Coated Communist [Hardcover]

Tristam Hunt is evidently a professional popular historian. He has read the standard bibliography and a bit more. He brings to bear his ability to write a coherant, balanced and easy-to-read narrative - a not inconsiderable skiill.

His idéal is almost certainly Francis Wheen's breezy but measured biiography of Marx. Wheen is name checked in the acknowledgements - along with British Labour politician Ed Milliband ! More significantly thanked is Simon Rigby, a careful academic scholar on Marxism whose positions clearly influence the author and pull him back from some of his more flipant inclinations.

Such flipancy motivates the only variants from safe and unchallening narrative taken mostly from the footnotes of Marx and Engels' collected works (`MECW'). To take an example, in September 1848 in the course of widespread political unrest in Germany, Engels was expelled from Cologne and sent by train to Paris. Penniless, he travelled from there on foot to Geneva, leaving Paris some time after the 5th October and arriving in Geneva around the 28th of October, and then on to Berne where he arrived sometime early in November. There he waited for the all-clear from Marx to return to Germany. On his way, he drafted a journalistic piece mixing political commentary on rural France with a travelogue-style description of the countryside : not an unusual style of writing for the period. Hunt leverages off the upbeat style of this unfinished and unpublished piece to build a picture of Engels having abandoned the revolution for a `walking holiday' (P.166), an `Arcadian walking tour' (P.171) or what he later sloppily calls the `1849 walking tour' (P.318) . The suggestion is clear that Engels was only a rich boy playing politics as a hobby..

Every aspect of Hunt's extended depiction of this minor event is slightly mis-presented in order to place Engels in the worst possible light. Fundamentally , what Hunt misses is that this was one of the few times in his life when Engels was without money - Marx, temporarlily enriched by his inheritance, was actually sending Engels money ! Walking to the safe haven of Switzerland was an entirely rational response to being penniless and dumped in a dangerously counter revolutionary Paris, no longer safe for radicals like Engels. Switzerland was the smart place to be. Walking was the safe and cheapest way to travel. Hunt also misses the simple fact that Engels actually covered around 550 km in about 23 days, quite a vigorours pace which belies the pastoral stylistic devices of his journalistic piece. Hunt takes the style for the fact, because it suits his purpose.. It is a tiny example. But there are quite a few.

For example, he observes of Marx `nothing infuriated him more than authentic, revolutionary credentials' (P. 185) . The comment is assinine. Hunt superficially condemns Engels for `hypocrisies for making his living off the textile trade which did so much damage to the Indian economy' (P.228). He feels no need to consider with any care whether there really are moral contradictions and not merely material contradictions in this situation.

To prove his claim - probably true - that Engels visited prostitutes, he takes the French term `grisette' as indicating prostitutes. Another biographer, John Green, has pointed out in The Guardian in 2009 that this is incorrect. But Hunt could have seen this himself from MECW 50 P.182 (particularly when compared to P. 190) where Engels uses the term grissette to mean simply young French working class women and to refer to delegates at a socialist conference. Nor is going to see prostitutes morally inconsistent with the view of prostitution set out for example, at P. 66-67 of MECW 50 where Engels' argument is that prostitutes should be freed from State persecution - as he explains elsewhere, until economic development makes prostitution redundant.

He charges Engels with supporting the British state against a possible invasion by Louis Napoleon because Engels designated the bonapartist regime as `reactionary' (P.222) and cites a source (MECW 11 P.204) where Engels did not make that argument. He suggests a conflict between The Communist Manifesto and the duo's programmatic document for the German Revolution of 1848, when there is no conflict. (P.157). He states that Engels `revered' Wellington (P.219). He quotes a passage whose ironic tone he misunderstands, gives the wrong référence (MECW 10 P.332) for its source and entirely misses Engels' actual assessment of Wellington as `overestimated' and ` a small and narrow mind' (MECW13 P.196).

When describing the Paris Commune, he acknowledges the existence of the `Communes conscious proletarin élément (P.253) but describes these as `Jacobins and Blanquists rather than Marxists (P.253). This ignores the internationalists like Eugene Varlin, final military commander and Elizabeth Dimitrieff, Marx's personal agent, who formed part of an increasingly influential minority tendency withiin the Commune.

Hunt describes Engels as `dismissive of the campaign for female suffrage' (P.317). But it is not female suffrage of which Engels was dismissive, rather it was the bourgeois-led suffrage movement. Engels voiced no concerns about the SPD campaign in 1893 and 1894 for female suffrage in Germany. Hunt fails to mention Marx and Engels consistent campaign in the First International for women to be allowed to organise separately - to mention that woud ruin the effect Hunt is aiming for.

Not all of his misjudgements are negative. Of Engels's rôle in the composition of Volume One of Kapital, he claims Engels `had provided many of the book's core insights into the actual workings of capital and labour (....) as well as its essential philosophy.' (P.237) Hunt is surely the first to think that Engels' influence extended quite that far !

To the modern eye the most fascinating part of Engels life is the period 1882-95 when the old revolutionary had an almost svengali-like status for the German SPD.. One would expect a modern biography to pour over this fascinating period in great détail, bringing together Engels' large correspondence, now available, with the many studies and much primary source material also available about many others from that period. But the treatment of this extraordinary period in Engels' life is paedestrian,.

Engels was certainly not a `great' man, whatever that means. But few have ever expended wealth and talent with such panache as this 19th century, challengingly masculine, Orson Wells of revolutionary politics.

Wheen's similar biography of Marx will probably just about survive as a substitute for Isaiah Berlin's better and similar effort. Hunts' will not.

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