ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by considering the readings of the Condition proposed by Mayhew Engels’s English-speaking friends and enemies. It identifies and criticises the shared presuppositions of readings of the Condition made by the historians Hobsbawm, Henderson and Chaloner, and the literary critic Marcus. The chapter considers the readings of Marx and Engels’s texts of the 1840s made by the French Marxist Althusser. The presupposition of a debate about Engels’s scholarship is that Engels is writing empirical history about the ‘facts’. It is this presupposition that makes it possible to judge Engels as though he were a professional colleague and to discuss whether the Condition attains the standard required of academic historiography. Marx and Engels’s pre-1845 discourse is part of a genre of discourse or, more exactly, discourses. The Condition’s deployment of evidence is explicable at the juridical level: Engels, the prosecuting counsel, has to make the charge stick.
