"A Very Special Business Angel." THE ECONOMIST August 13, 2009.

Hunt, Tristram. The Frock-Coated Communist: the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Also pub. as Marx’s General: the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. New York: Metropolitan, 2009. WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to Das Kapital—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14209490.

Service, Robert. "The Frock-Coated Communist: the Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels." TIMES April 26, 2009.

Hunt, Tristram. The Frock-Coated Communist. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Alone amid the Manchester 19th-century “cottonocracy”, Friedrich Engels hoped for the British economy’s collapse and was carefree about losing his fortune forever. That alone would have made him the most extraordinary capitalist. But of course we have a further reason to remember him: Engels and his friend Karl Marx were communists. Together they developed a theory proclaiming the inevitable fall of capitalism; and neither of them would have been as surprised as most of our financial commentators have been by the world economy’s vulnerability to the rapacity and irresponsibility of bankers. As Tristram Hunt’s excellent book emphasises, Engels was nearly 50 before he left the offices of Ermen & Engels in the north of England and dedicated himself full-time to the revolutionary cause. Born into an industrialist’s family in the Rhineland in 1820, he horrified his parents with his radical beliefs. He took a break from his capitalist functions in the mid-1840s and wrote The Communist Manifesto with Marx. Returning to Germany in 1848 when revolutions broke out in Europe, he saw armed action before their suppression. He had always been an involuntary factory owner. Without agreeing to tend his German father’s business interests in Manchester he would have lacked the income for himself and Marx to live in the comfort they took as their right. The profligate Marx was constantly on the edge of penury. Engels counted his pennies (or rather his tens of thousands of pounds) more carefully but did not stint in his pleasures. He rode out regularly with the prestigious and costly Cheshire Hounds. He drank wine of quality and ­Pilsner beer in quantity. He treated himself to bevies of young women, including prostitutes. He dressed in fashion. Engels kept up bourgeois appearances by holding his capitalist and communist lives separate. The frock-coated German industrialist bought a second home in Manchester where he installed his fiery Irish mistress Mary Burns and welcomed his socialist comrades. Mary’s sister Lizzy took her place as his lover when she died. Northern industrialists knew he was a “red” but Engels was discreet about his political and sexual activity and avoided social ostracism. After 1869, when the Ermen brothers bought him out of the business, he moved to London and continued to flourish handsomely through judicious ­investments. He was one of those coupon- ­snipping rentiers that he and Marx subjected to withering contempt in their pamphlets. . . . Read the whole review here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6154072.ece.

Hunt, Tristram. "No Marx without Engels." HISTORY TODAY 59.4 (2009).

It is a truth now universally acknowledged that capitalism’s most insightful philosopher is Karl Marx. For over a decade, the one time ideological ogre ‘responsible’ for the killing fields of Cambodia and excesses of the Soviet Union has been lauded as the first thinker to chart the true nature of the free market. ‘Marx’s Stock Resurges on a 150-Year Tip’ was how the New York Times marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto – a text which, more than any other, ‘recognised the unstoppable wealth-creating power of capitalism, predicted it would conquer the world, and warned that this inevitable globalisation of national economies and cultures would have divisive and painful consequences.’ In 2005, the French politician-cum-banker Jacques Attali went further, to pinpoint Marx as the first great theorist of globalisation. Today, in the midst of a once-a-century crisis of capitalism, Das Kapital has raced to the top of the German bestseller lists and even President Sarkozy has been caught leafing through its pages. But as with so much of the Karl Marx myth, the role of his lifelong friend and ideological ally Friedrich Engels has been airbrushed from history. The co-author of The Communist Manifesto, co-founder of Marxism and architect of much of modern socialism, is nowhere to be seen in this shower of admiration. Yet when it comes to the Marxian analysis of capitalism, any credible account must have Engels alongside Marx. For Marx only gained his unique appreciation of the functioning of capitalism thanks to Engels’ first-hand experiences. Moreover, it was Engels who went on to edit the crucial passages of Das Kapital which dealt with the inherent instability of the capitalist model. If we are to look for the origins of one of the most salient criticisms of the market system, we should start with Engels. . . .