Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, social theorist and businessman who was Karl Marx's closest friend, co-author and financial supporter for nearly forty years. The son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, he wrote one of the first great studies of industrial working-class life, co-wrote The Communist Manifesto, and after Marx's death edited the unfinished volumes of Capital. Through his popular summaries he did more than anyone else to turn Marx's ideas into the doctrine known as Marxism.

Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, a centre of the textile industry in the Rhineland of the Kingdom of Prussia, now part of the city of Wuppertal. His family were prosperous mill owners and strict Pietist Protestants. His father took him out of school at seventeen to learn the family business, and from 1838 he worked as a clerk in a trading house in Bremen. There, in his spare time, he read radical literature, lost his religious faith and began writing journalism under the pen name Friedrich Oswald, criticising the narrow piety and harsh working conditions of his home town.

In 1841 to 1842 he did his military service in an artillery regiment in Berlin. He used the time to attend lectures at the university and joined the Young Hegelians, the radical followers of Hegel who were then turning his philosophy against religion and the Prussian state.

In late 1842 his father sent him to Manchester, in England, to work at the cotton-spinning firm of Ermen and Engels, in which the family was a partner. Manchester was the heart of the Industrial Revolution, and Engels explored its slums and factory districts, guided in part by Mary Burns, an Irish working woman who became his partner. The result was The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), a vivid account of overcrowded housing, disease, child labour and poverty, which argued that industrial capitalism was creating a large and increasingly conscious proletariat.

Engels had briefly met Karl Marx in Cologne in 1842, but their friendship began in Paris in August 1844, when they discovered that they had reached similar conclusions independently. They wrote The Holy Family (1845), an attack on their former Young Hegelian associates, and The German Ideology, which first set out their materialist view of history but was not published in their lifetimes. In 1847 they joined the Communist League, and early in 1848 they produced The Communist Manifesto.

During the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, Engels worked with Marx on a radical newspaper in Cologne and then fought as an aide in the failed rising in Baden and the Palatinate, before escaping to Switzerland and then England. In 1850 he returned to the family firm in Manchester, a job he disliked but kept for almost twenty years, eventually becoming a partner. His income allowed him to send Marx regular sums of money, without which Marx could hardly have written Capital. Engels also wrote many of the articles that appeared under Marx's name in the New-York Daily Tribune, and became an expert on military affairs, earning the nickname "the General".

Mary Burns died in 1863, and Engels then lived with her sister Lydia, known as Lizzie, whom he married on her deathbed in 1878. In 1870 he sold his share of the business and moved to London, living near Marx. In Anti-Dühring (1878), a polemic against a rival German socialist, he presented Marxism as a complete worldview covering nature, history and society; extracts were published as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which became one of the most widely read socialist texts. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drawing on the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, argued that the family, private property and the state were historical developments rather than permanent features of human life, and linked the subordination of women to the rise of private property.

At Marx's funeral in 1883, Engels declared that just as Charles Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, Marx had discovered the law of development of human history. He devoted his last twelve years to editing the second and third volumes of Capital from Marx's chaotic manuscripts, published in 1885 and 1894, while acting as an adviser to the growing socialist parties of Europe, particularly the German Social Democrats, and to the Second International founded in 1889. He died of cancer of the oesophagus in London on 5 August 1895, and his ashes were scattered at sea off Beachy Head, on the south coast of England.

Engels was a talented writer who made complex arguments accessible, but scholars disagree about how faithfully he represented Marx. In works such as Anti-Dühring and the unfinished Dialectics of Nature, he argued that the dialectical laws Hegel had described, such as the transformation of quantity into quality, applied not only to history but to nature itself. This dialectical materialism, a phrase later associated with his approach, became the official philosophy of the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin and his successors. Some later Marxists and scholars blamed Engels for turning Marx's critical, open-ended thought into a rigid and deterministic system; others see the two men's views as essentially the same, pointing out that Marx read and approved much of what Engels wrote.

His study of Manchester remains a classic of urban and social history, and his work on the family influenced later socialist and feminist thinkers. His place among the thinkers of his age is traced on the nineteenth-century philosophy page, and his homeland in the history of Germany.