The life and thought of Friedrich Engels: a reinterpretetion

294 Book Reviews mind. So, if one is not to assume that matter may think, a cause that may legitimately influence mind has to be postulated. One option that offered itself in the eyes of many was that God somehow makes known to human minds what their senses register. Here the ‘systems’ epitomised by Malebranche’s occasionalism and Leibniz’s pre-established harmony come into their own. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONML Locke and French M aterialism exhibits the careful, detailed historiography characteristic of Yolton’s work. For this reader the book’s only weakness lies in its overall structure. Since each chapter tends to function as a self-contained unit, topical chapters (such as ‘The Three Hypotheses’) are mingled with chapters (such as ‘David R. Boullier’) that focus on the contributions of particular persons to the debates at hand. This structural problem leads to some repetitiveness in the treatment of both topics and authors. Such repetitiveness, however, really is a minor price to pay for a book brimming with summaries of texts that reflect a relentless survey of the literature of the time, often relying on reviews, pamphlets and books that only meticulous archival research can locate. For those interested in the effect of Locke’s work on French eighteenth-century materialism, and for those interested in forerunners to some of today’s debates in philosophy of mind and psychology, this book should prove to be a very valuable resource. Thomas Heyd University of Victoria NOTES 1. See Keith Campbell, ‘Materialism,’ Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 Volumes (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 5, pp. 179-188. 2. See John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book 4, Chapter 3, Section 6. 3. See e.g. Locke, Essay, Books 1 and 2. 4. See e.g. Locke, Essay, 2, 1, 3. 5. Locke to Peter King, 4 and 25 October 1704, letter 3647 in ES. de Beer (ed.), The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 Volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 8, pp. 412-413. ‘l%e Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels: a Reinterpretation, J.D. Hunley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), xiii + 184 pp., f14.00/$25.00. Historians and political theorists of the nineteenth century will discover in J.D. Hunley’s reprise of Friedrich Engels an engaging portrait and a painstaking study. As an interpretive biography of one who stands always in the shadow of the more incandescent member of a great pair of activist intellectuals, the book convinced this reader that Engels deserves more light. This volume also demonstrates that serious biography-a genuine ‘life’ as opposed to elusive for Engels. The same is philosophical debate and ideological skirmish -remains true for Karl Marx. While earlier studies seldom rose above political hagiography, the rarefied atmosphere of Marxist scholasticism continues to be an inescapable temptation. Book Reviews 295 Terre11 Carver’s Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1989), the only comprehensive analytical biography, is a philosophical assessment keyed nearly as much to the famous pair as it is to Engels himself. Carver’s earlier work, M arx andEngels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), is an exemplar of this biographical dualism, and Carver has announced a forthcoming work that will complete a trilogy, M arx and Engels: The Politicai Relationship. In Hunley’s study, two brief chapters provide a compact examination of Engels’ ‘early years’ and ‘later life.’ We learn something about his schooling as a boy in Barmen (now Wuppertal (under the influence of the staunch Calvinist Pietism of his family and municipal schoolmasters, followed by a classical curriculum at the Gymnasium in Elberfeld. He mastered his Greek and Latin with modest success before being directed by his father to leave school in the year of his final examinations to begin work in the family’s textile manufacturing firm. There is also a sketch of Engels’ early literary tastes and his irrepressible intellect. He published his first poetry at the age of seventeen, wrote about his dramatic loss of religious faith, and enlisted in the Prussian army in order to audit courses at the University of Berlin. There he encountered philosophy, that is to say, for a student in Berlin: Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Schelling and the Young Hegelians. The remaining two-thirds of the book is a detailed analysis of Engels’ own ideas and literary output in relation to those of Marx. Hunley’s admiration for Engels as a personality and as a thinker is always clear. He attacks what he calls the ‘dichotomists’ among Marxist scholars who have insisted upon crucial differences between Engels and Marx, a comparison in which Engels is always revealed in a decidedly unflattering light. Hunley is resolutely and persuasively critical of the tradition of Marxist scholarship that has diminished Engels’ contribution to the Marx-Engels collaboration, depreciated his talents, criticised him for reformist ideas after Marx’s death, and even blamed him for the tyrannical catastrophes of communist states. A refutation of this interpretation is the central theme of the book. There are separate chapters on Engels’ alleged reformism and on the extent to which his philosophical views differed significantly from Marx’s with respect to humanism and determinism. These pages will appeal mainly to exegetes of the Marxist canon, but the general reader will be impressed by the author’s mastery and deployment of primary sources. The exposition is openly polemical, candidly intent upon vindicating Engels against Marxist critiques that Engels, after Marx’s death, sold out proletarian revolution to political reform and, paradoxically, also entertained crudely deterministic and mechanical laws of historical change. Hunley’s defence is spirited, refreshing and persuasive, especially in his able use of little known published sources, Marx and Engels’ vast correspondence, and pseudonymous or recently attributed works. Nevertheless, such debate may strain the reader’s interest. The grim obsession of theoreticians to distil and purify Marx’s thought, preserving it from any contamination while elaborating it in an expansive but faithful tradition, is surely now archaic. Hunley’s determination to rescue Engels from ideological distortions, for other reasons, is perhaps also a kind of nostalgia. While his study is a candid appreciation and apology, it is so in a very different manner from old-fashioned marxology. There is a flavour of genuine intellectual biography, with a fascination and empathy for its subject, but with an independent judgment and an external view. It is not the work of a true believer, For scholars who do still wish to re-examine the standard debates-the ‘early’ vs the ‘mature’ Marx, the extent to which Engels influenced Marx’s thought, distorted his posthumous publications and subverted revolutionary class struggle-Hunley provides a concise and carefully documented review. Hunley’s absorption in the primary works and original German sources, and his familiarity with the major figures of Marxist scholarship, make him a formidable critic of the orthodox view that Engels’ thought lacked scope, originality and subtlety. What struck this reader forcibly was Hunley’s 296 Book Reviews evidence of the extent to which Engels was not simply ‘influential,’ but was often actually the ghost-writer or editor of Marx’s publications. One of the most convincing arguments Hunley advances concerning the profound mutality and life-long stability of the Marx-Engels collaboration rests upon what we know about Marx’s relationship with so many others in the international socialist movement. Marx was combative, ungrateful, vituperative, jealous, uncooperative, slanderous and arrogant. He got along with no one for very long-except Engels. He did not always understand or sympathise with Engels, especially with the latter’s unorthodox conjugal relations with Mary Burns, an illiterate Irish factory worker and domestic servant, and then her sister, Lizzie. But it is quite clear that Marx depended upon Engels for many things: his amazing breadth of literacy; his energetic ability to produce huge technical manuscripts (often for Marx’s wholesale adaptation or by-line) in the space of a few days; his judgment on timing and appropriateness in matters of political intervention; his criticisms on style, form and argument with regard to Marx’s manuscripts and galley proofs; and perhaps most importantly, upon Engels’ freely given companionship and good cheer in the Marx family circle. There is no evidence at all that Marx’s comity, solicitous good will, respectful intellectual dialogue and sheer collaboration on the writing, revising, proof-reading and production of all of Marx’s writings depended upon the fact that, for over thirty years, Engels’ financial support enabled Marx to maintain a spare but decent household in London. This book provides just enough to make us want to know more about Engels’ youth, education, early intellectual development and indifferent career as a businessman. It is as if we have only begun to focus a spotlight on Engels himself, and what we see is surely one of the most resourceful, committed and wide-ranging minds of the nineteenth century, adept in philosophy, politics, military history and strategy, economics and sociology. Moreover, he is a figure one can admire for his obsessions and achievements, and yet imagine as a friend. Hunley does us the great service to report Engels’ answers to a parlour game-‘Confessions’-that he played in 1868. Engels confessed that his favourite virtue was cheerfulness. His favourite characteristic in a man was minding his own business. Excess of all kinds was a vice he forgave, but he abhorred the vice of hypocrisy. To define his conception of happiness, he wrote ‘Chateau Margaux 1848’. Asked to name his favourite hero, he wrote ‘none’. Paul E. Corcoran University of Adelaide Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: an Introduction to Vitue Sunctorum Hiberniae, Sharpe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), xii + 427 pp., $118.00. Richard At one point in this book Sharpe remarks that the seventeenth-century editor John Colgan ‘is known to have been.. . indifferent to minutiae’, and that even the Bollandists ‘set no great store by fidelity in points of detail’ (p. 126 ff.). Such comments will presumably never be made about Sharpe himself. Roughly two-thirds of his text (Part II, ‘The Textual Evidence’) is a meticulously detailed examination of the three major collections of Latin hagiography for Irish saints, preserved in the thirteenthand fourteenth-century manuscripts traditionally known as the Codex Kilkenniensis at Dublin, the Codex Insulensis at Oxford, and the Codex Salamanticensis at Brussels.