The principal intellectual collaborator of MARX from 1844. Although his family owned textile mills in the Rhineland and Manchester, he was a social critic from the age of 18. He never attended university but came under the influence of the Young Hegelians in Berlin; his practical knowledge of business was to temper Marxian theory. His interest in economics began with an essay Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (1844). His analysis of industrialization and his prophecy of a proletarian revolution impressed Marx.
They jointly wrote Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family) (1845), Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology) (1845–6) and Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto) (1848). Engels is also noted for his Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy) (1844) and Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (The Condition of the Working Class in England) (1945), as well as his posthumous editing of the second and third volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital. His frequent financial help to the Marx family maintained his great friend in his chosen career. Living in retirement for twenty-six years, he was able to reconstruct the remainder of Marx’s Das Kapital from mounds of notes.
References
Carver, T. (1983) Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship, Brighton: Wheatsheaf.
Henderson, W.O. (1976) The Life of Friedrich Engels, 2 vols, London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass.
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