Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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textile mill in Barmen dined almost exclusively on bread and potatoes, “Here he eats beef every day and gets a more nourishing joint for his money than the richest man in Germany. He drinks tea twice a day and still has enough money left over to be able to drink a glass of porter at midday and brandy and water in the evening.”5
To be sure, unemployed cotton workers had had to turn to the Poor Law and private soup kitchens to avoid “absolute starvation,” and Edwin Chadwick’s just-published Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain revealed that the average male life span in Manchester was seventeen years, half that of nearby rural villages, and that just one in two babies survived past age five. Chadwick’s graphic descriptions of streets that served as sewers, cottages damp with mold, rotting food, and rampant drunkenness demonstrated that British workers had ample grounds for resentment.6 But while Carlyle, the only Englishman Engels admired, warned of working-class revolt, Engels found that most middle-class Englishmen considered the possibility remote and looked to the future with “remarkable calm and confidence.”7
Once settled in his new home, Engels resolved the conflict between his family’s demands and his revolutionary ambitions in a characteristically Victorian fashion. He lived a double life. At the office and among his fellow capitalists, he resembled the “sprightly, good humored, pleasant” Frank Cheeryble, the “nephew of the firm” in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby who “was coming to take a share in the business here” after “superintending it in Germany for four years.”8 Like the novel’s attractive young businessman, Engels dressed impeccably, joined several clubs, gave good dinners, and kept his own horse so that he could go fox hunting at friends’ estates. In his other, “true” life, he “forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne” to moonlight as a Chartist organizer and investigative journalist.9 Inspired by the exposés of English reformers and often accompanied by an illiterate Irish factory girl with whom he was having an affair, Engels spent his free time getting to know Manchester “as intimately as my native town,” gathering materials for the dramatic columns and essays he filed to various radical newspapers.
Engel’s twenty-one months as a management trainee in England led him to discover economics. While German intellectuals were obsessed by religion, the English seemed to turn every political or cultural issue into an economic question. It was especially true in Manchester, a stronghold of English political economy, the Liberal Party, and the Anti–Corn Law League. To Engels, the city represented the interconnections between the industrial revolution, working class militancy, and the doctrine of laissez-faire. Here “it was forcibly brought to my notice that economic factors, hitherto ignored or at least underestimated by historians, play a decisive role in the development of the modern world,” he later re-called.10
Frustrated as he was by his lack of a university education, particularly his ignorance of the works of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and other British political economists, Engels was nonetheless perfectly confident that British economics was deeply flawed. In one of the last essays he wrote before leaving England, he hastily roughed out the essential elements of a rival doctrine. Modestly, he called this fledgling effort “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.”11
Across the English Channel in St. Germain-en-Laye, the wealthiest suburb of Paris, Karl Marx had buried himself in histories of the French Revolution. When Engels’s final piece arrived in the post, he was jolted back to the present, electrified by his correspondent’s “brilliant sketch on the critique of economic categories.”12
Marx too was the prodigal (and profligate) son of a bourgeois father. He too was an intellectual who felt trapped in a philistine age. He shared Engels’s sense of German intellectual and cultural superiority, admired all things French, and bitterly resented British wealth and power. Yet he was in many ways Engels’s opposite. Domineering, impetuous, earnest, and learned, Marx had none of the other man’s glibness, adaptability, or cheerful bonhomie. Only two and a half years older, Marx was not only married and the father of a baby girl but also a doctor of philosophy who insisted on being addressed as such. A short, powerfully built, almost Napoleonic figure, he had thick jet-black hair that sprouted from cheeks, arms, nose, and ears. His “eyes glowed with an intelligent and malicious fire,” and, as his assistant at the Rheinische Zeitung recalled, his favorite conversation starter was “I am going to annihilate you.”13 One of his biographers, Isaiah Berlin, identified Marx’s “belief in himself and his own powers” as his “single most outstanding characteristic.”14
While Engels was practical and efficient, Marx was, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “without administrative experience” or any “business contact with a living human being.”15 He was undeniably brilliant and erudite, but he had never acquired Engels’s work ethic. Whereas Engels was ready at any hour to roll up his sleeves and start writing, Marx was more likely to be found in a café, drinking wine and arguing with Russian aristocrats, German poets, and French socialists. As one of his backers once reported, “He reads a lot. He works with extraordinary intensity . . . He never finishes anything. He interrupts every bit of research to plunge into a fresh ocean of books . . . He is more excitable and violent than ever, especially when his work has made him ill and he has not been to bed for three or four nights on end.”16
Marx had been forced to turn to journalism when he failed to obtain an academic post at a German university and his long-suffering family finally cut him off financially.17 After just six months at his newspaper job in Cologne—“the very air here turns one into a serf”—he picked a fight with the Prussian censor and quit. Luckily, Marx was able to convince a wealthy Socialist to finance a new philosophical journal, the Franco-German Annals, and appoint him to run it in his favorite city, Paris.
Engels’s reports from Manchester emphasizing the link between economic causes and political effects made a powerful impression on Marx. Economics was new to him. The terms proletariat, working class, material conditions, and political economy had yet to crop up in his correspondence. As his letter to his patron shows, he had envisioned an alliance of “the enemies of philistinism, i.e. all thinking and suffering people,” but his goal was reforming consciousness, not abolishing private property. His contribution to the first and only issue of the Franco-German Annals makes clear that Marx meant to hurl criticisms, not paving stones, at the powers that be: “Every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.”
He went on, “We shall simply show the world why it is struggling . . . Our program must be: the reform of consciousness . . . the self-clarification . . . of the struggles and wishes of the age.” The philosopher’s role was like that of a priest: “What is needed above all is a confession, and nothing more than that. To obtain forgiveness for its sins, mankind needs only to declare them for what they are.”
Marx and Engels had their first real encounter in August 1844 at the Café de Regence. Engels stopped in Paris on his way home to Germany expressly to see the man who had earlier rebuffed him. They talked, argued, and drank for ten straight days, discovering again and again that each had been thinking the other’s thoughts. Marx shared Engels’s conviction of the utter hopelessness of reforming modern society, and the need to free Germany from God and traditional authority. Engels introduced him to the idea of the proletariat. Marx felt an immediate sense of identification with that class. He saw the proletariat not only, as one might expect, as the “naturally arising poor” but also as the “artificially impoverished . . . masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society,”18 aristocrats who had lost their lands, bankrupt businessmen, and unemployed academics.
Like Carlyle and Engels, Marx seized on hunger and rebelliousness as evidence of the bourgeoisie’s unfitness for rule: “absolutely imperative need” will drive the proletariat to overthrow its oppressors, he predicted.19 By abolishing private property, the proletariat would free not only itself but the entire society. As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observes, Engels and Marx were hardly the only Victorians