For sixty years this book was read as Marx's. The nineteen articles collected here appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune across 1851 and 1852 over Marx's signature - he was the paper's contracted correspondent - and only in 1913, when the Marx-Engels correspondence was published, did it emerge that Engels had written every word. Marx, as this edition's own note records, "at that time was engaged in economic research"; Engels, who had the German events at his fingertips and wrote quick, muscular English, supplied the copy.
What the book does supremely well is turn the materialist method on a defeat, and its opening is a manifesto against the whole idea that history is made by wire-pullers. "The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators, have long passed away," Engels writes; "wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented by outworn institutions from satisfying itself." The upheavals of 1848 "were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities."
From that footing he dissects the classes of Germany with the confidence of a man who had watched them at close range: the big bourgeoisie too timid and too tied to the old order to make its own revolution, the petty bourgeoisie forever vacillating, the peasantry inert, the young working class advanced in a few centres and absent elsewhere. His verdict on the German liberals - that they wanted the fruits of a revolution without the revolution, and so betrayed it at every turn - became one of the most durable theses in the tradition. The closing chapter on insurrection, treating revolutionary action as an art with rules rather than an adventure or a prophecy, would be quoted for a century.
This is the Progress Publishers text carried in the Moscow Selected Works. Its chapter titles are not Engels's either: the Tribune printed the articles without subheadings, and the divisions were supplied by Marx's daughter Eleanor Marx-Aveling for the first separate English edition of 1896.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
