Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, journalist, businessman, and revolutionary socialist. He is best known for his lifelong collaboration with Karl Marx, with whom he co-authored The Communist Manifesto and developed the political and philosophical system that came to be known as Marxism. After Marx's death, Engels served as the editor of his works, completing the second and third volumes of Das Kapital.
Born in Barmen, Prussia, to a prosperous mercantile family, Engels rejected his family's devoutly pietistic values from a young age. He became involved with the Young Hegelians while performing military service in Berlin and embraced a materialist philosophy. In 1842, his father sent him to Manchester, England, to work in a cotton mill in which the family had an investment. His experiences of the industrial working class there led him to write his first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
In 1844, Engels began a permanent partnership with Marx in Paris. Together they worked to critique the prevailing idealist philosophies and develop their materialist conception of history, notably in The Holy Family and The German Ideology. They became active in the Communist League, which commissioned them to write the Manifesto. Engels participated actively in the Revolutions of 1848, including in armed combat, before being forced into exile in England. From 1850, he lived in Manchester and worked for the family firm of Ermen & Engels for two decades, leading a double life as a respectable cotton merchant while providing crucial financial support to the impoverished Marx family in London.
After retiring in 1870, Engels moved to London and took on a central role in the International Workingmen's Association. Following Marx's death in 1883, he devoted the rest of his life to editing Marx's writings and acting as the leading authority on their shared philosophy. His own works, particularly Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, were instrumental in popularizing Marxism and became foundational texts for the Second International. Engels's application of dialectics to science in works like Dialectics of Nature was later controversially developed into the state ideology of the Soviet Union. He died of cancer in London in 1895, and his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head.
Early life (1820–1841)
Upbringing in Barmen
Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, in the Province of Jülich-Cleves-Berg of Prussia. He was the eldest of nine children born to Friedrich Engels Sr., a prosperous cotton mill owner, and Elise Franziska Mauritia von Haar, the daughter of a schoolmaster. The Engels family were devout Protestants and belonged to the Pietist movement, an influential form of German Lutheranism that stressed personal devotion and practical faith. This background instilled in Engels a deep religiosity in his youth, marked by his 1837 Confirmation poem, but also exposed him to a Calvinist work ethic that fused worldly success with signs of divine grace.File:Wuppertal.Engelshaus06.jpg|thumb|left|Engels's childhood home in Barmen, Prussia, a town which he later described as the "Zion of the obscurantists".
Engels grew up in the Wupper valley, an early industrial centre known as the "German Manchester". His childhood home was part of a family compound surrounded by factories, workers' tenements, and the family's commercial enterprises. His great-grandfather had founded a firm for bleaching yarn, which had expanded to include a spinning mill and a lace-knitting factory. From his earliest days, he was exposed to the harsh realities of industrialisation: polluted rivers, dangerous working conditions, and the stark contrast between the "spacious and sumptuous houses" of the merchant elite and the poverty of the working class. The family business, Ermen & Engels, which his father co-founded with Dutch partners Godfrey and Peter Ermen in 1837, would later expand to include a major thread factory in Manchester.
Despite the family's strict Pietist and commercial ethos, which valued industriousness and viewed pleasure as a "heathen blasphemy", Engels's home life was not without warmth. His father was a keen musician who played the cello, and the family enjoyed chamber concerts of piano, cello, and bassoon. His mother, Elise, was more humorous and well-read than her husband; he inherited her "cheerful disposition" and love of reading, and she fostered his intellectual curiosity, introducing him to German literature and giving him the complete works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a Christmas present. His maternal grandfather, Bernhard van Haar, a pastor and school headmaster, introduced him to classical mythology, while his mother also told him stories of Greek heroes. Concerned about his son's rebellious spirit, his father once discovered a "dirty book from a lending library, a romance of the thirteenth century" that the young Engels had been reading in secret.
Education and early radicalism
From an early age, Engels chafed against the strictures of Barmen life. At fourteen, he was sent to the municipal Gymnasium in nearby Elberfeld, which was purportedly one of the finest in Prussia. There, under the tutelage of his history and literature teacher, Dr. Johann Clausen, he developed a growing interest in the myths and romance of ancient Germania and the liberal nationalism of the Young Germany movement. This romantic patriotism was an early intellectual influence, shaping his imagination with heroic legends like Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero of the Nibelungenlied. His early writings reveal a political romanticism that fused Byronic heroism with the recent struggle for Greek independence, as seen in his unfinished 1837 story, "A Pirate Tale", which showed a fascination with the "hardware of war".His father, concerned about his son's literary and philosophical leanings, withdrew him from the Gymnasium in September 1837, just nine months before his graduation and just before his seventeenth birthday. The decision reflected both his father's authoritarianism and Engels's own desire to pursue literature as his "inner and real" career alongside his "outward profession" in business. He was expected to join the family business, dashing his hopes of studying law at university. He spent a year being inducted into the family firm in Barmen, during which he read rationalist works such as David Strauss's The Life of Jesus. His youthful poetry turned into imitations of the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was then employed as a clerk in a local business. In July 1838 he was sent to Bremen for a commercial apprenticeship at the trading house of Heinrich Leupold, a linen exporter.
Apprenticeship in Bremen
The coastal air of Bremen, a free Hanseatic trading city, proved more congenial to Engels than the "low Barmen mists". While working as a clerk handling international correspondence, he took full advantage of the city's more liberal social life. He took dancing lessons, went horse-riding, swam in the Weser, and joined the Academy of Singing. A suavely attractive and vain young man, he sported a moustache as a political statement and engaged in the student practice of fencing, boasting of duels fought to defend his honour.It was in Bremen that Engels began to write publicly. Using the pseudonym "Friedrich Oswald" to hide his identity from his family, he contributed cultural criticism and feuilletons to Karl Gutzkow's paper, Telegraph für Deutschland. His most significant work of this period was Letters from Wuppertal, a searing eyewitness account of the social conditions in his home region. A "sensational attack on hypocrisy in the valley towns", it offered a brutal critique of the human costs of industrialisation—the exploitation of child labour, the rampant alcoholism, the "smoky factory buildings" and the red-dyed Wupper river—and linked this misery directly to the religious hypocrisy of the Pietist factory owners. The publication of the Letters caused a severe conflict with his parents and established the basis for his later separation from them.
During this time, Engels underwent a profound intellectual and spiritual transformation. Dissatisfied with the "narrow spiritualism" of Wuppertal Pietism, he began to question the central tenets of Christianity. His reading of Strauss's The Life of Jesus, which treated the Gospels as historically contingent myths rather than literal truth, had shattered his faith. After a period of intense doubt, he embraced his new status: "I am now a Straussian", he declared to friends in October 1839. The psychological vacuum left by his lost faith was quickly filled by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel's philosophical system, with its emphasis on the rational, ordered development of history as an unfolding of Spirit, instantly attracted him. Engels adopted a form of modern Pantheism, merging divinity and reason with the developmental unfolding of the world. "The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine", he wrote, "and thus I am joining the ranks of the 'modern pantheists'".
Philosophy and communism (1841–1844)
Berlin and the Young Hegelians
In September 1841, Engels began his one-year compulsory military service with the Royal Prussian Guards Artillery in Berlin. He entered without conspicuous enthusiasm, hoping to "free myself from the military", and his letters from this period show little serious interest in military studies, concentrating instead on the "ludicrous side of army life". As a volunteer with a private income, he lived in lodgings and spent most of his time not on the parade ground but at the University of Berlin as a non-matriculated student. He attended lectures on philosophy, most notably those of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who had been brought to Berlin by the Prussian authorities to combat the influence of the radical Young Hegelians. Engels, however, sided firmly with the Hegelians, joining their "philosophical hue and cry" against Schelling. He published two anonymous pamphlets critiquing Schelling's lectures: the first, Schelling and Revelation, was a serious critique that served as a readable "plain man's guide to the Young Hegelian movement", while the second, Schelling, Philosopher in Christ, was a satirical parody cleverly placed with a Pietist publisher.Engels became a prominent member of the Young Hegelian circle known as Die Freien, a group of aggressive, bohemian intellectuals who met in the city's beer cellars to debate philosophy and politics. Its members included Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. This group pushed Hegel's philosophy in a radical, atheistic, and revolutionary direction. They rejected Hegel's conservative interpretation, which saw the Prussian state as the culmination of reason, and instead used his dialectical method as a tool for critiquing religion and the state. The work of Ludwig Feuerbach, particularly The Essence of Christianity, was a major influence. Feuerbach had argued that man had created God in his own image, alienating his own human essence onto an external being. "We were all Feuerbachians for a moment", Engels later recalled of the book's liberating effect. During this period, Engels co-authored with Edgar Bauer a mock-epic poem, The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible, which depicted Karl Marx as a "swarthy chap from Trier, a marked monstrosity", raving with wild impetuosity.