"Written with brio, warmth, and historical understanding, this is the best biography of one of the most attractive inhabitants of Victorian England, Marx's friend, partner, and political heir."—Eric Hobsbawm

Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family, he spent his life enjoying the comfortable existence of a Victorian gentleman; yet he was at the same time the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless political tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so that Karl Marx could have the freedom to write. Although his contributions are frequently overlooked, Engels's grasp of global capital provided an indispensable foundation for communist doctrine, and his account of the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and brutal indictments of capitalism's human cost.

Drawing on a wealth of letters and archives, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt plumbs Engels's intellectual legacy and shows us how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his exuberant personal life with his radical political philosophy. This epic story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal at last brings Engels out from the shadow of his famous friend and collaborator.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. With strong scholarship in Marxist history and theory, a fluent style and some healthy doses of irony, Hunt (Building Jerusalem) traces the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto from his pious Prussian roots through his apprenticeship in the family textile firm in Manchester, England, early years at the forefront of revolutionary upheavals throughout Europe and his subsequent return to the family industry to support Marx's family and writing. Engels is characterized as a gregarious yet committed theorist and activist, providing considerable financial and intellectual resources to Marx while accepting his own role as second fiddle in their joint battle for socialist ideological dominance. Though the book makes a strong case for the value of Engels's own writings on working conditions and defends against reductive readings that would align him with the rigid orthodoxies of Leninism and Stalinism, the author is clear-eyed with regard to Engels's less savory, sometimes deeply chilling ideas and his divisive manipulations of organizations and party politics. This is an impressive biography of a fascinating figure whose attempts to synthesize his own contradictory roles as arch-capitalist and seminal communist, embody the very notion of dialectics so central to Marxist theory. (Aug.)
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From The New Yorker

“It all began over drinks,” Hunt writes of the forty-year collaboration between Karl Marx and his benefactor, ghostwriter, and best friend, Friedrich Engels. Engels’s life was defined by an awkward tension. When he could afford it, he was a muckraking journalist, street-fighting revolutionary, and international libertine. When he couldn’t, he was tethered to Manchester and his father’s cotton mill, supplying Marx with the money (and the empirical evidence) he needed to complete “Das Kapital.” This greatly enjoyable biography of “the original champagne communist” is a perceptive tour not just through Engels’s life but through philosophy and political thought in the nineteenth century, though it will inevitably be read through the lens of the twentieth. Engels saw the existence of the Slavs “in the heart of Europe as an anachronism,” at once indicating a low opinion of the people who would first embrace Marxism and hinting at the pitiless path Communism later took.