This is an attractive biography of Friedrich Engels. If his life is less well known than that of Marx, Engels would not complain - over and over, from his first meeting with Marx in 1844, he stressed with genuine modesty that Marx was the genius to whom he played second fiddle. His admiration of Marx, his staunch friendship, his financial generosity to him and his family (even including those of them who were shameless spongers) are all selfless. Hunt makes it clear, though, how enormously important his intellectual contributions to Marxism were, how tirelessly he did research for Marx, how they discussed their ideas with each other almost daily - by letter when Engels was living in Manchester and Marx in London, and by daily visits when Engels moved to London himself, a short distance away from Marx's home.
The book sets the ideas of Marx and Engels very fully into the historical context and into that of other kinds of socialism, and Engels certainly shared Marx's combativeness towards the exponents of rival theories. That is all pretty well known to anyone who is interested in Marxist theory. But I found less familiar material in the last two chapters. These cover Engels' interest in science, technology, Darwinian evolution, all of which he tried to fit into the framework of dialectical materialism. They deal with Engels' analysis of the subjection of women in economic terms: their to-be-desired liberation, like that of the proletariat, would result from the private property (of men) being eventually replaced by a more communistic society, with the family disappearing as an economic unit. But he had little sympathy for the women's movement, regarding it as a distraction from the class struggle. They show how Engels, like Marx, had originally seen war as a catalyst for revolution, but how in the 1890s Engels came to dread it: it would fill the workers with chauvinism, and, though revolution might come at the end if it, the price would be too high. To prevent it, he urged that mass conscription made it possible for socialism to infiltrate the armies and turn them against their officers, and it would prevent the army being used to crush the workers.
Hunt credits Engels' "Anti-Dühring" of 1877 with being more influential in spreading Marxist theory than Marx's own bulky "Kapital". In it he criticized Dühring for, among other things, envisaging the peaceful development of Socialism. But towards the end of his life, Engels softened the rigidities of Marxist theory: in his 1886 Preface of the first English edition of "Das Kapital" he thought that perhaps in some countries socialism might be reached by peaceful parliamentary means; and the success of the German Socialist Party at the 1890 reinforced that idea. (Hunt does not mention that Marx himself had expressed such a view as early as 1872, though only in a private letter.)
Engels was a wealthy businessman in Manchester between 1849 and 1869 when his partners bought him out for the equivalent today of £1.2m. His wealth was of course based on being a capitalistic employer. He saw no problem in this, since he used his wealth to advance socialism. Nor was there anything austere in his life-style - he was a bon viveur, a rider to hounds and a womanizer (though I found his relationship first with Mary Burns, an uneducated Irish working-class girl and, after her death, with her even less educated sister Lizzie rather touching). He had a great capacity to make people love him, and must have been, I think, a warm-hearted and very attractive person. And a happy one - more so as in his last years he felt that Marxism was really making progress.
Hunt ends with an Epilogue in which he asks how much responsibility Engels (and for that matter Marx) have to bear for the horrors perpetrated by Lenin and Stalin who proclaimed themselves his disciples. He acquits them: Engels and Marx were far too humanist, both too outraged by the immiseration of the working class for them not to be horrified by the miseries inflicted on the workers by the forced industrialization in communist states. Their aim was to set the people free - not to make them slaves of the state.
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