Marx is back in fashion. For decades Marxists have been an endangered species, but now the collapse of capitalism has caused a revival in their stock and Das Kapital tops the German bestseller lists. Tristram Hunt’s biography of Karl Marx’s shadowy collaborator Friedrich Engels could hardly be more timely.
‘Marx was a genius,’ declared Engels, ‘we others were at best talented.’ Engels was a socialist hack who had the nous to attach himself to the genius Marx. It was his friendship with Marx that differentiated him from the other would-be revolutionaries, now long forgotten, who sat up drinking and arguing until 3 a.m. in the bars of Brussels in the 1840s. But as Tristram Hunt makes clear, Engels was not just Marx’s stooge. Without Engels, Marx might never have made it. The two men were bonded by a co-dependent relationship that in many ways resembled a marriage.
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