![]() ![]() Even in the German-speaking world, the book almost immediately became a bibliographic rarety and it was never translated, except in an extremely truncated version. ![]() The second volume appeared at the end of 1932 and was almost immediately suppressed by the incoming Nazis. The first volume appeared in 1918, at a time when the attention of German socialists was deflected by the end of the war and the splits of the November revolution. He was also unlucky in the timing of his biography. Because Mayer was not a Marxist, his research went virtually unacknowledged by Communist writers, even though he deliberately confined himself to a painstaking descriptive reconstruction of Engels’s life and work, and ventured few judgements of his own. footnote 1 But Mayer’s work has remained little studied, indeed virtually unknown until its republication in the last decade. On the contrary, Engels was magnificently served by one of the best of twentieth-century scholarly biographies, that of Gustav Mayer, the product of over three decades of research and a scarcely rivalled knowledge of nineteenth-century German labour and socialist history. The continued prevalence of these rather stale alternatives cannot be attributed to the lack of an adequate scholarly basis on which Engels’s career could more imaginatively be judged. Yet, since at least the break-up of the Second International, he has been persistently treated, either simply as Marx’s loyal lieutenant, or else as the misguided falsifier of true Marxist doctrine. Engels was both the acknowledged co-founder of historical materialism and the first and most influential interpreter and philosopher of Marxism. S ince his death in London in 1895, it has proved peculiarly difficult to arrive at a fair and historically balanced assessment of Engels’s place in the history of Marxism, both within the Marxist tradition and outside it. ![]()
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