The political ideas of Marx and Engels

Monthly Review, June, 1986 by Paul Le Blanc

MARX AND ENGELS: TOUGH-MINDED DEMOCRATS

With the appearance of his second and posthumously published volume of The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Richard N. Hunt has established his place in the tradition of outstanding Marx scholarship personified by Franz Mehring, Gustav Mayer, David Riazanov, and Boris Nicolaevsky. The two volumes brim over with information and insightful interpretations but are at the same time (unlike so much Marx scholarship) clearly written and easily accessible to any serious reader.

Richard Hunt died of leukemia in 1982 at the age of 51. He is not well known in left-wing intellectual circles, which is not surprising. A modest American-born historian whose teaching career was mostly confined to the University of Pittsburgh, Hunt had little inclination to engage in polemical sorties in radical journals; he was a very gentle man who did not have the intense temperament of a political militant. There were political affiliations: the Young Progressives of America, the Independent Socialist League, the Socialist Party, and finally the Democratic Socialists of America. But Dick Hunt's energies were concentrated on his teaching, on capably chairing the university's history department from 1976 to 1980, and on producing a few very useful works of scholarship, including German Social Democracy, 1818-1850 (1964) and an anthology entitled The Creation of the Weimar Republic: Stillborn Democracy? (1969).

His masterwork, however, rises well above the level of simply "capable scholarship." The first volume, published in 1974, was subtitled Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818-1850, and its value has been appreciatively noted by other scholars over the past decade. He completed the second volume literally days before he died--through an effort which in itself constitutes an inspiring act of affirmation and commitment. It has now been published with the subtitle Classical Marxism, 1850-1895.

In his preface to the second volume, Hunt offers an acknowledgment characteristic of the man:

At the end of so many years of work on what was to be a "comprehensive" study, I am also more aware of its actual limitations. I have not dealt at all with Marx and Engels' views on international relations, for example, especially relationships between more advanced and less advanced countries, or the political aspects of ethnic minority conflicts, or women's rights issues--all topics of considerable interest. But I am pleased to see that other writers are taking up such subjects and will fill out the gaps left in this book.

He very much saw the work in which he was engaged as a collective effort. Nonetheless, the two volumes stand as a substantial achievement of intellectual history and a most impressive contribution for those who are concerned with socialist ideals and ideas.

In the face of "scholarly" mountains and swamps of Cold War anti-Marxism, Richard Hunt has insisted that the Marxism of Marx and Engels was profoundly antitotalitarian. A salient feature of his two-volume work is the patient and uncompromising thoroughness with which he demonstrates--in lucid prose and a seemingly dispassionate (but in fact deeply yet quietly passionate) tone--that from the 1840s until the end of their lives Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were "tough-minded democrats" (vol. I, p. 16). Any honest scholar who wishes to assert the contrary will now have to confront the massively documented and closely reasoned account which is presented in these volumes. Hunt's familiarity with the secondary literature on Marxism is impressively wide ranging. Even more impressive is his familiarity with the immense quantity of Marx's and Engels' own works. "I have examined everything Marx and Engels wrote," he writes in the preface to his first volume, "convinced that such Germanic thoroughness must find its due reward. And indeed, many famous but notoriously ambiguous texts, for example, in the Communist Manifesto, can be elucidated with the help of contemporaneous essays and letters that are almost unknown" (vol. I, p. XIII). This is not an empty boast. One benefit of reading these volumes is that they give the reader a sense of "the lay of the land" in the vast and complex terrain of the Marx-Engels collected works, even if one does not fully accept some of Hunt's interpretive cartography. Also, the author consistently strives to relate the texts to biographical and historical contexts. We find ourselves not simply in the realm of ideas, but also confronting the realities of European and world history, as well as the realities of the labor and socialist movements of the nineteenth century.

Hunt explores a number of major themes in the works of Marx and Engels: the theory of the state; the problem of bureaucracy; revolutionary strategy; tactics and ethics; the relationship of revolutionary theory to the workers' movement; the question of class alliances; problems of revolutionary organization; the nature of capitalism, of the precapitalist past, and of the socialist future. Their specific analyses of how such questions relate to realities in Germany, France, England, the United States, and Russia are similarly presented with sophistication and clarity.