Friedrich Engels

Source

• Born: 28 November 1820
• Birthplace: Barmen, Germany
• Died: 5 August 1895 (cancer)
• Best Known As: Karl Marx's collaborator and editor

Friedrich Engels moved from Germany to England in 1842, where he worked as a manager in a factory. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, which suggested that the poor working class would only benefit if they fought for socialism. Engels had met Karl Marx in 1844 and together they wrote the Communist Manifesto, predicting ultimate victory for the proletariat. After 1848 Engels returned to England and financially supported Marx, whose works he also edited and translated.

Engels, Friedrich (1820-95), political economist, military writer, and theorist; friend, colleague, and adviser of Karl Marx; and founder of communism. Born at Wuppertal on 28 November 1820, he began writing political tracts in 1839. In November 1842 he visited Manchester in Britain and became a member of the Chartist movement, and first met Marx in Paris in 1844. His experiences led to writing The Situation of the Working Class in Britain (1844-5) and, in turn, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Further experience of the 1848-50 revolutions in Europe and particularly in Germany led to the writing of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1851-2). In 1850 he returned to Manchester where he worked in a commercial firm, partly to subsidize Marx.

In 1870 Marx and Engels attended the Congress of the First International in London. In 1871 Engels welcomed the Paris Commune, fitting it into his view of progress through capitalism towards a dictatorship of the proletariat. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels completed and published the unfinished second and third volumes of Das Kapital.

Engels was an expert analyst of military affairs and, in particular, of the mid-19th-century revolution in military affairs and the role of industry and arms manufacture. Marx considered that he had ‘made the study of military questions his speciality’. Many of the articles attributed to Marx owe much to Engels. Their division of interest was fairly clear cut, Marx studying the political essence of wars and their character, Engels, the material basis of military affairs and the nature and origin of wars and armies.

Engels's detailed study of military affairs was fired by the Crimean and American civil wars, although much of his military analysis dates from later life. He realized that future wars between major powers would be total war, and would depend to an unprecedented degree on technology which, in turn, depended on a nation's industrial base. In 1892 he wrote ‘from the moment warfare became a branch of the grande industries (ironclad ships, rifled artillery, quickfiring and repeating cannon, repeating rifles, steel covered bullets, smokeless powder, etc.) la grande industrie, without which all these things cannot be made, became a political necessity’. In a letter of 1888 he prophesied the nature of war accurately enough. ‘No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war, and a war of an extension and violence hitherto undreamt of.’ The study of war could not be extracted from its political economic and diplomatic context—as he wrote, ‘diplomacy is higher than strategy’.

Engels's views on the military revolution taking place at the time were sound enough, but hardly unique, and he would probably not have gone down in history as a great military thinker and analyst were it not for his friend Marx. It is questionable whether either of them would be remembered today had their work not been taken up by Lenin. But for the study of the 19th-century revolution in warfare his work is important.

— Christopher Bellamy

The German revolutionist and social theorist Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was the cofounder with Karl Marx of modern socialism.

Friedrich Engels was born on Nov. 28, 1820, in Barmen, Rhenish Prussia, a small industrial town in the Wupper valley. He was the oldest of the six children of Friedrich and Elisabeth Franziska Mauritia Engels. The senior Engels, a textile manufacturer, was a Christian Pietist and religious fanatic. After attending elementary school at Barmen, young Friedrich entered the gymnasium in nearby Elberfeld at the age of 14, but he left it 3 years later. Although he became one of the most learned men of his time, he had no further formal schooling.

Under pressure from his tyrannical father, Friedrich became a business apprentice in Barmen and Barmen, but he soon called it a "dog's life." He left business at the age of 20, in rebellion against both his joyless home and the "penny-pinching" world of commerce. Henceforth, Engels was a lifelong enemy of organized religion and of capitalism, although he was again forced into business for a number of years.

While doing his one-year compulsory military service (artillery) in Berlin, Engels came into contact with the radical Young Hegelians and embraced their ideas, particularly the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. After some free-lance journalism, part of it under the pseudonym of F. Oswald, in November 1842 Engels went to Manchester, England, to work in the office of Engels and Ermens, a spinning factory in which his father was a partner. In Manchester, the manufacturing center of the world's foremost capitalist country, Engels had the opportunity of observing capitalism's operations - and its distressing effects on the workers - at first hand. He also studied the leading economic writers, among them Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Robert Owen in English, and Jean Baptiste Say, Charles Fourier, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in French. He left Manchester in August 1844.

On his way back to Germany, Engels stopped in Paris, where he met Karl Marx for a second time. On this occasion a lifelong intellectual rapport was established between them. Finding they were of the same opinion about nearly everything, Marx and Engels decided to collaborate on their writing.

Engels spent the next 5 years in Germany, Belgium, and France, writing and participating in revolutionary activities. He fought in the 1849 revolutionary uprising in Baden and the Palatinate, seeing action in four military engagements. After the defeat of the revolution, he escaped to Switzerland. In October 1849, using the sea route via Genoa, he sailed to England, which became his permanent home.

In November 1850, unable to make a living as a writer in London and anxious to help support the penniless Marx, Engels reluctantly returned to his father's business in Manchester. In 1864, after his father's death, he became a partner in the firm, and by early 1869 he felt that he had enough capital to support himself and to provide Marx with a regular annuity of £350. On July 1, 1869, Engels sold his share of the business to his partner. He exulted in a letter to Marx: "Hurrah! Today I finished with sweet commerce, and I am a free man!" Marx's daughter, Eleanor, who saw Engels on that day, wrote: "I shall never forget the triumphant 'For the last time,' which he shouted as he drew on his top-boots in the morning to make his last journey to business. Some hours later, when we were standing at the door waiting for him, we saw him coming across the little field opposite his home. He was flourishing his walking stick in the air and singing, and laughing all over his face."

In September 1870 Engels moved to London, settling near the home of Marx, whom he saw daily. A generous friend and gay host, the fun-loving Engels spent the remaining 25 years of his life in London, enjoying good food, good wine, and good company. He also worked hard, doing the things he loved: writing, maintaining contact and a voluminous correspondence with radicals everywhere, and - after Marx's death in 1883 - laboring over the latter's notes and manuscripts, bringing out volumes 2 and 3 of Das Kapital in 1885 and 1894, respectively. Engels died of cancer on Aug. 5, 1895. Following his instructions, his body was cremated and his ashes strewn over the ocean at Eastbourne, his favorite holiday resort.

Personality and Character

Engels was medium-height, slender, and athletic. His body was disciplined by swimming, fencing, and riding. He dressed and acted like an elegant English gentleman. In Manchester, where he maintained two homes - one for appearances, as befitted a member of the local stock exchange, and another for his Irish mistress - he rode to hounds with the English gentry, whom he despised as capitalists but by whose antic behavior he was sardonically amused.

Engels had a brilliant mind and was quick, sharp, and unerring in his judgments. His versatility was astonishing. A successful businessman, he also had a grasp of virtually every branch of the natural sciences, biology, chemistry, botany, and physics. He was a widely respected specialist on military affairs. He mastered numerous languages, including all the Slavic ones, on which he planned to write a comparative grammar. He also knew Gothic, Old Nordic, and Old Saxon, studied Arabic, and in 3 weeks learned Persian, which he said was "mere child's play." His English, both spoken and written, was impeccable. It was said of him that he "stutters in 20 languages."

Engels apparently never married. He loved, and lived with successively, two Irish sisters, Mary (who died in 1863) and Lydia (Lizzy) Burns (1827-1878). After he moved to London, he referred to Lizzy as "my wife." The Burns sisters, ardent Irish patriots, stirred in Engels a deep sympathy for the Irish cause. He said of Lizzy Burns: "She came of real Irish proletarian stock, and the passionate feeling for her class, which was instinctive with her, was worth more to me than all the blue-stockinged elegance of 'educated' and 'sensitive' bourgeois girls."

His Writings

Engels published hundreds of articles, a number of prefaces (mostly to Marx's works), and about half a dozen books during his lifetime. His first important book, written when he was 24 years old, was The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, based on observations made when he lived in Manchester. It was published in German in 1845 and in English in 1892. His next publication was the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Communist Manifesto), which he wrote in collaboration with Marx between December 1847 and January 1848, and which was published in London in German a month later. An anonymous English edition came out in London in 1850.

Engels also collaborated with Marx on The Holy Family, an attack on the Young Hegelian philosopher Bruno Bauer, which was published in Germany in 1845. Another collaboration with Marx, The German Ideology, was written in 1845-1846, but it was not published in full until 1932.

In 1870 Engels published The Peasant War in Germany, which consisted of a number of articles he had written in 1850; an English translation appeared in 1956. In 1878 he published perhaps his most important book, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, known in an English translation as Anti-Dühring (1959). This work ranks, together with Marx's Das Kapital, as the most comprehensive study of socialist (Marxist) theory. In it, Engels wrote, he treated "every possible subject, from the concepts of time and space to bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future society."

Engels's Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science was published in German in 1882 and in English, under the title Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, in 1892. In 1884 he brought out The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, an indispensable work for understanding Marxist political theory. His last work, published in 1888, was Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Both of these last books are available in English. Two works by Engels were published posthumously: Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (German, 1896; English, 1933) and Dialectics of Nature, begun in 1895 but never completed, of which an English translation appeared in 1964.

Engels's Ideas

In his articles and books Engels elaborated and developed, both historically and logically, basic ideas that go under the name of Marxism. His work was not an limitation of Marx but constituted a consistent philosophy at which both men had arrived independently and had shared in common. Engels refined the concept of dialectical materialism, which Marx had never fully worked out, to include not only matter but also form. He stressed that the materialist conception takes into consideration the whole cultural process, including tradition, religion, and ideology, which goes through constant historical evolution. Each stage of development, containing also what Engels called "thought material," builds upon the totality of previous developments. Thus every man is a product both of his own time and of the past. Similarly, he elaborated his view of the state, which he regarded as "nothing less than a machine for the oppression of one class by another," as evolving, through class struggles, into the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Further Reading

Although Engels's writings are available in English, there is no good biography of him in English. Some biographical information can be found in Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: A Biography (1934; trans. 1936), a dated and incomplete work; Grace Carlton, Friedrich Engels: The Shadow Prophet (1965), a superficial biography not based on original sources; and Oscar J. Hammen, The Red 48'ers: Karl Marx and FriedrichEngels (1969). Good general works which discuss Engels are Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940); George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (1961); and Bertram D. Wolfe, Marxism: One Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine (1965).

(1820-95) Born in Barmen near Düsseldorf, the eldest in a family of eight, Engels was the son of a wealthy mill owner who was as much dedicated to the pietist church and good works as he was to profit. At school he proved himself to be a gifted student of languages. He also quickly developed an enduring admiration for ancient Greek civilization. Later Engels was to combine his compulsory military service in the Prussian artillery with attendance at Berlin University. In Berlin he was influenced by the materialism and humanism of the Young Hegelian critique of religion and, when in Cologne, he was strongly attracted by the communism of Moses Hess. He is remembered now, of course, as the life-long friend, collaborator, and financial supporter of Karl Marx, a collaboration which began in real earnest 1845 with the joint writing of The German Ideology, the first full statement of historical materialism. Orthodox Marxists are still rather inclined to assume that Marx and Engels were intellectual twins with a kind of composite personality. Nothing could be further from the truth. While there were large and unquestioned areas of agreement between Marx and Engels, most of all in political economy, the history of industry, and in the demands and tactics of the proletarian party, there were also crucial areas of disagreement, particularly, perhaps, in natural science and in the philosophy of nature. Engels was a Darwinian of sorts and he kept abreast of modern developments in evolutionary biology. He also saw that modern materialism was inextricably bound up with the concept of evolution by natural selection and his Introduction to the Dialectics of Nature, first published in 1925, shows him to be very well informed about the history of the evolutionary idea. Marx, on the other hand, was a critic of Darwin, characterizing his method as crude and his results as inconclusive. He much preferred the environmentalism of the Frenchman Pierre Trémaux, a stance which led Marx to argue that the Confederate states would win the American Civil War because they were built on better soil. More important, perhaps, was that Engels was solely responsible for formulating the doctrine of dialectical materialism and for attempting to rest Marxism on a dialectical philosophy of nature. In Anti-Dühring of 1876, Engels applied universal dialectical laws to geology, mathematics, history, philosophy, to thought itself, and even to grains of barley, the three main dialectical laws being negation of the negation, the interpenetration of opposites, and the transformation of quantity into quality. There is no evidence that Marx approved of this. Indeed, many scholars now insist that Engels was writing in a mode and with conclusions about dialectics that Marx could never have accepted.

Engels' influence on Marxism was greatly increased by the fact that he was editor of Marx's posthumous works.

— John Halliday

For more information on Friedrich Engels, visit Britannica.com.

Engels, Friedrich (1820-95). Engels was the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx. Son of a German textile manufacturer, Engels worked in a family-owned cotton-mill in Manchester. He met Marx in 1842, and together they wrote the Communist Manifesto during the revolutionary unrest of 1848. Engels, who gave Marx generous financial help, was closely involved with all of Marx's writings, and functioned as the authentic voice of Marxist views after Marx's death. In addition, Engels contributed a distinctive dimension to Marxist ideology—what has been termed ‘dialectical materialism’.

Engels, Friedrich (Barmen, 1820-1895, London), was the son of a factory owner and trained for his father's business. He did not become seriously involved with social problems until his close contact and collaboration with K. Marx. From 1844 on he remained a loyal friend of Marx, whom he was able to help in London, while he worked in his father's business at Manchester. He was, however, not only a popularizer of socialism but a sociologist in his own right, as his research into the conditions of the British working class shows (Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England, 1845). He became increasingly interested in the impact of materialism on philosophy (Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, 1886). After his death his study Revolution und Konterrevolution in Deutschland (1896) was published under Marx's name. A Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe was begun in 1926 and a new edition (under the auspices of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism of the German Democratic Republic) in 1975.

Engels, Friedrich (1820-95) German social philosopher and collaborator of Marx. Born in the Rhineland of prosperous, factory owning parents, Engels already had good liberal credentials when he came to Manchester in 1842, partly as agent for the family firm. In the following years his writings attracted the approval of Marx, and the affinity was confirmed by the impassioned Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845, trs. as The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845). Engels collaborated with Marx on The Communist Manifesto (1848). He is generally credited with shaping two of the major philosophical components of Marxism: historical materialism and dialectical materialism. His most mature philosophical work is Anti-Dühring (1878), a materialist rebuttal of the work of Eugen Dühring, one of Marx's rivals for influence in German socialist circles. Another late work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) is a communist, and feminist, attack on the subordination of women in the patriarchal family. Engels was the main supporter of Marx and his family, but also the editor of Marx's works, so that the task of separating their respective contributions to Marxist doctrine is daunting.

(1820 - 1895), German socialist theoretician; close collaborator of Karl Marx.

Friedrich Engels is remembered primarily as the close friend and intellectual collaborator of Karl Marx, who was the most important socialist thinker and arguably the most important social theorist of the nineteenth century. Engels must be regarded as a significant intellectual figure in his own right. Engels's writings exerted a strong influence on Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. Engels was born in Barmen in 1820, two and a half years after Marx. Ironically, Friedrich Engels worked for decades as the manager of enterprises in his family's firm of Ermen and Engels; this necessitated his move to Manchester in 1850. Engels contributed substantially to the financial support of Marx and his family. He survived Marx by twelve years, during an important period in the growth of the socialist movement when Engels served as the most respected spokesman for Marxist theory.

In recent decades there has been a lively debate over the degree of divergence between Marx's thought and that of Engels, and therefore over whether the general scheme of interpretation known as "historical materialism" or "dialectical materialism" was primarily constructed by Engels or accorded with the main thrust of Marx's intellectual efforts. George Lichtheim and Shlomo Avineri, distinguished scholars who have written about Marx, see Engels as having given a rigid cast to Marxist theory in order to make it seem more scientific, thus implicitly denying the creative role of human imagination and labor that had been emphasized by Marx. On the other hand, some works, such as those by J. D. Hunley and Manfred Steger, emphasize the fundamental points of agreement between Marx and Engels. The controversy remains unresolved and facts point to both convergence and divergence: Marx and Engels coauthored some major essays, including The Communist Manifesto, and Engels made an explicit effort to give Marxism the character of a set of scientific laws of purportedly general validity. The well-known laws of the dialectic, which became the touchstones of philosophical orthodoxy in Soviet Marxism-Leninism, were drawn directly from Engels's writings.

Bibliography

Carver, Terrell. (1989). Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought. London: Macmillan.

Hunley, J. D. (1991). The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels: A Reinterpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Steger, Manfred B., and Carver, Terrell, eds. (1999). Engels after Marx. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

—ALFRED B. EVANS JR.

Engels, Friedrich (frē'drĭkh ĕng'əls) , 1820–95, German socialist; with Karl Marx, one of the founders of modern Communism. The son of a wealthy Rhenish textile manufacturer, Engels went in 1842 to take a position in a factory near Manchester, England, in which his father had an interest. In 1844, while passing through Paris, he met Marx, and their lifelong association began. Engels's first major book was The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845, tr. 1887), which attracted wide attention. From 1845 to 1850 he was active in Germany, France, and Belgium, organizing revolutionary movements and collaborating with Marx on several works, notably the Communist Manifesto (1848). The failure of the revolutions of 1848 caused his return (1850) to England, where he lived the rest of his life. He was a successful businessman, and from his income he enabled Marx to devote his life to research and writing. Engels played a leading role in the First International and the Second International. After Marx's death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital from Marx's drafts and notes. The intimate intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels leaves little doubt that there was complete harmony of thought between them, although critics have sometimes questioned their full agreement. Marx's personality has overshadowed that of Engels, but the influence of Engels on the theories of Marxism, and particularly on the elaboration of dialectical materialism, can scarcely be overestimated. Engels's Anti-Dühring (1878, tr. 1934) and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884, tr. 1902) rank among the fundamental books in Communist literature and profoundly influenced Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Among his other works is The Peasant War in Germany (tr. 1926).

Bibliography

See selected correspondence with Marx, ed. by D. Torr (1942); the Collected Works of Marx and Engels (40 vol., 1975–83); his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (1883, tr. 1892) and Dialectics of Nature (1925, tr. 1940); biography by G. Mayer (1936, repr. 1969); The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by R. C. Tucker (1972); S. Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (1974); J. Sayers et al., ed., Engels Revisited: New Feminist Perspectives (1987); W. O. Henderson, Marx and Engels and the English Workers and Other Essays (1989).

(eng-uhlz, eng-guhlz)

A German socialist of the nineteenth century who collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto and on Das Kapital.

Quotes:

"Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal."

"People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy."

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."

"By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live."

"Just as Marx used to say about the French Marxists of the late seventies: All I know is that I am not a Marxist."

"The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of societythe taking possession of the means of production in the name of societythis is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not abolished. It dies out."

See more famous quotes by Friedrich Engels

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)