Friedrich Engels Biography

World of Sociology on Friedrich Engels

The German revolutionist and social theorist Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) cofounded with Karl Marx modern socialism. Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, Rhenish Prussia, a small industrial town. 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, young Friedrich attended the gymnasium in nearby Elberfeld for three years. Although he became learned, he had no further formal schooling.

Under pressure from his tyrannical father, Friedrich became a business apprentice, but he left business at the age of twenty, in rebellion against both his joyless home and the "penny-pinching" world of commerce. After this Engels was a lifelong enemy of organized religion and of capitalism.

While doing his one-year compulsory military service (artillery) in Berlin, Engels came into contact with radical young Hegelians and embraced their ideas, particularly the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. In 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 observed capitalism's operations--and its distressing effects on the workers--first hand. He also studied the leading economic writers, among them Smith, Ricardo, and Owen in English, and Say, Fourier, and 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. Finding they shared the same opinions, Marx and Engels decided to collaborate on their writing.

Engels spent the next five years in Germany, Belgium, and France, writing and participating in revolutionary activities. 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.

In September 1870 Engels moved to London, settling near the home of Marx, whom he saw daily. He worked hard, doing the things he loved: writing, maintaining a voluminous correspondence with radicals everywhere, and--after Marx's death in 1883--laboring over the latter's notes and manuscripts, bringing out volumes two and three of Das Kapital in 1885 and 1894, respectively. Engels died of cancer on August 5, 1895.

Engels had a brilliant mind and was quick, sharp, and unerring in his judgments. 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 three weeks learned Persian, which he said was "mere child's play." His English, both spoken and written, was impeccable.

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 his wife. The Burns sisters, ardent Irish patriots, stirred in Engels a deep sympathy for the Irish cause.

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, was The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, based on observations made when he lived in Manchester. 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.

In 1870 Engels published The Peasant War in Germany, . 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.

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. Two works by Engels were published posthumously: Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (German, 1896; English, 1933) and Dialectics of Nature, which appeared in English in 1964.

His work was not an imitation of Marx but constituted a consistent philosophy at which both men had arrived independently and shared in common. Engels refined the concept of dialectical materialism. 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."