Manchester Man

Abstract

Engels arrived at the office of the Rheinische Zeitung and met the communist Hess for the first time about 7–8 October 1842. In correspondence of the following year Hess reported on this meeting with one of the paper’s occasional Berlin correspondents: ‘we talked over the issues of the day and he [Engels], a revolutionary of the Year I, departed from me a thoroughly zealous communist’. Engels’s ‘conversion’ to communism is traditionally dated to that meeting with Hess, and it is certainly true that socialist or communist ideas—there was no firm distinction at that time—do not appear in his writings up to then. Hess took credit for such a conversion by implying that he brought Engels forward from a primitive view of social transformation, one characteristic of the opening years of the French revolution, to the most up-to-date ideas of communism, such as his own (I/3-A MEGA² 685).