Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels. I: Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850 (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), xiv + 363 pp.

Abstract

Richard N. Hunt's The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels the first of two promised volumes is an exhaustively researched and painstakingly argued brief for a position that is becoming increasingly popular: that Marx and Engels were democrats. Despite all appearances they favored neither dictatorship nor minority revolution, but limited themselves to tactics in which violence would be kept at a minimum, and in which the rule of the proletariat was always equated with the democratic rule of the majority. In this first volume Hunt aims his thesis against the view associated with Jacob Talmon, that Marxism was a form of "totalitarian democracy." Having separated Marx and Engels from this tradition (whose existence, apart from them, he does not question) in volume one, Hunt promises to distinguish them from later nineteenth century social democracy in volume two. Marx and Engels occupied a position between the elitism of the former and the reformism of the latter, making them in Hunt's phrase, "hard-headed democrats." Beginning with an account of "totalitarian democracy" in the form of Blanquist revolutionary theory, Hunt shows that neither Marx nor Engels passed through this position on their way to proletarian communism. Marx came to communism through Hegelian radical liberalism and "true democracy" while Engels came to communism directly from the revolutionary democracy of Borne and Heine. In the process the two men evolved differing theories of the state, Marx's emphasizing the domination exercised by a despotic bureaucracy over the whole of civil society, Engels' the class nature of all political rule. (The two conceptions reflected German and English conditions, respectively.) The political future envisioned in the two men's intellectual partnership hence emphasized both the integration of political functions into social life and the elimination of class society. Behind this vision lay a "profound commitment to humanist and egalitarian values" which was sometimes obscured by Marx and Engels' later "scientific" vocabulary but which never lost its hold on their action or thought. They gave their aiiegiance to oniy two possible revolutionary strategies, revolution by a developed proletarian majority in no need of dictatorial education to prepare them for political rule, or, in less advanced conditions, revolution by an alliance of proletarians with the other "majority classes" peasants and artisans to establish a democratic regime within which the proletarian majority would have time to emerge. Despite their willingness to ally with Blanquist revolutionaries during 1850, Marx and Engels never really embraced the Blanquist strategy of minority revolution and educational dictatorship. The famous "March Circular" of 1850, in which Marx and Engels called for resolute action "to make the revolution permanent" in case the "bourgeois democrats" gained power in the coming upheaval, Hunt discounts as the result of a momentary compromise between the two friends and Blanquist members of the Communist League. Marx and Engels "were obliged to eat humble pie," and recommend actions they never really favored. Hunt disposes similarly of the troubling prediction in The Communist Manifesto that the bourgeois revolution in Germany would be "but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution"necessarily the work of a minority given backward German conditions. Marx and Engels included this phrase as