Friedrich Engels
German philosopher
born November 28, 1820, Barmen, Rhine Province, Prussia
died August 5, 1895, London
Main
German Socialist philosopher, the closest collaborator of
Karl Marx in the foundation of modern Communism. They
co-authored the Communist Manifesto (1848), and Engels
edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after
Marx’s death.
Early life
Engels grew up in the environment of a family marked by
moderately liberal political views, a steadfast loyalty to
Prussia, and a pronounced Protestant faith. His father was
the owner of a textile factory in Barmen and also a partner
in the Ermen & Engels cotton plant in Manchester, Eng. Even
after Engels openly pursued the revolutionary goals that
threatened the traditional values of the family, he usually
could count on financial aid from home. The influence of his
mother, to whom he was devoted, may have been a factor in
preserving the tie between father and son.
Aside from such disciplinary actions as the father
considered necessary in rearing a gifted but somewhat
rebellious son, the only instance in which his father forced
his will on Engels was in deciding upon a career for him.
Engels did attend a Gymnasium (secondary school), but he
dropped out a year before graduation, probably because his
father felt that his plans for the future were too
undefined. Engels showed some skill in writing poetry, but
his father insisted that he go to work in the expanding
business. Engels, accordingly, spent the next three years
(1838–41) in Bremen acquiring practical business experience
in the offices of an export firm.
In Bremen, Engels began to show the capacity for living
the double life that characterized his middle years. During
regular hours, he operated effectively as a business
apprentice. An outgoing person, he joined a choral society,
frequented the famed Ratskeller, became an expert swimmer,
and practiced fencing and riding (he outrode most Englishmen
in the fox hunts). Engels also cultivated his capacity for
learning languages; he boasted to his sister that he knew
24. In private, however, he developed an interest in liberal
and revolutionary works, notably the banned writings of
“Young German” authors such as Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow,
and Heinrich Heine. But he soon rejected them as
undisciplined and inconclusive in favour of the more
systematic and all embracing philosophy of Hegel as
expounded by the “Young Hegelians,” a group of leftist
intellectuals, including the theologian and historian Bruno
Bauer and the anarchist Max Stirner. They accepted the
Hegelian dialectic—basically that rational progress and
historical change result from the conflict of opposing
views, ending in a new synthesis. The Young Hegelians were
bent on accelerating the process by criticizing all that
they considered irrational, outmoded, and repressive. As
their first assault was directed against the foundations of
Christianity, they helped convert an agnostic Engels into a
militant atheist, a relatively easy task since by this time
Engels’ revolutionary convictions made him ready to strike
out in almost any direction.
In Bremen, Engels also demonstrated his talent for
journalism by publishing articles under the pseudonym of
Friedrich Oswald, perhaps to spare the feelings of his
family. He possessed pungent critical abilities and a clear
style, qualities that were utilized later by Marx in
articulating their revolutionary goals.
After returning to Barmen in 1841, the question of a
future career was shelved temporarily when Engels enlisted
as a one-year volunteer in an artillery regiment in Berlin.
No antimilitarist disposition prevented him from serving
commendably as a recruit; in fact, military matters later
became one of his specialties. In the future, friends would
often address him as “the general.” Military service allowed
Engels time for more compelling interests in Berlin. Though
he lacked the formal requirements, he attended lectures at
the university. His Friedrich Oswald articles gained him
entrée into the Young Hegelian circle of The Free, formerly
the Doctors Club frequented by Karl Marx. There he gained
recognition as a formidable protagonist in the philosophical
battles, mainly directed against religion.
Conversion to communism
After his discharge in 1842, Engels met Moses Hess, the man
who converted him to communism. Hess, the son of wealthy
Jewish parents and a promoter of radical causes and
publications, demonstrated to Engels that the logical
consequence of the Hegelian philosophy and dialectic was
communism. Hess also stressed the role that England, with
its advanced industry, burgeoning proletariat, and portents
of class conflict, was destined to play in future upheavals.
Engels eagerly seized the opportunity to go to England,
ostensibly to continue his business training in the family
firm in Manchester.
In England (1842–44), Engels again functioned
successfully in business. After hours, however, he pursued
his real interests: writing articles on communism for
continental and English journals, reading books and
parliamentary reports on economic and political conditions
in England, mingling with workers, meeting radical leaders,
and gathering materials for a projected history of England
that would stress the rise of industry and the wretched
position of the workers.
In Manchester, Engels established an enduring attachment
to Mary Burns, an uneducated Irish working girl, and, though
he rejected the institution of marriage, they lived together
as husband and wife. In fact, the one serious strain in the
Marx–Engels friendship occurred when Mary died in 1863 and
Engels thought that Marx responded a little too casually to
the news of her death. In the future, however, Marx made a
point of being more considerate, and, when Engels later
lived with Mary’s sister Lizzy, on similar terms, Marx
always carefully closed his letters with greetings to “Mrs.
Lizzy” or “Mrs. Burns.” Engels finally married Lizzy, but
only as a deathbed concession to her.
In 1844 Engels contributed two articles to the Deutsch-Französische
Jahrbücher (“German-French Yearbooks”), which were edited by
Marx in Paris. In them Engels put forth an early version of
the principles of scientific socialism. He revealed what he
regarded as the contradictions in liberal economic doctrine
and set out to prove that the existing system based on
private property was leading to a world made up of
“millionaires and paupers.” The revolution that would follow
would lead to the elimination of private property and to a
“reconciliation of humanity with nature and itself.”
Partnership with Marx
On his way to Barmen, Engels went to Paris for a 10-day
visit with Marx, whom he had earlier met in Cologne. This
visit resulted in a permanent partnership to promote the
socialist movement. Back in Barmen, Engels published Die
Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1845; The Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1844, 1887), a classic in
a field that later became Marx’s specialty. Their first
major joint work was Die deutsche Ideologie (1845; The
German Ideology), which, however, was not published until
more than 80 years later. It was a highly polemical critique
that denounced and ridiculed certain of their earlier Young
Hegelian associates and then proceeded to attack various
German socialists who rejected the need for revolution.
Marx’s and Engels’ own constructive ideas were inserted here
and there, always in a fragmentary manner and only as
corrective responses to the views they were condemning.
Upon rejoining Marx in Brussels in 1845, Engels endorsed
his newly formulated economic, or materialistic,
interpretation of history, which assumed an eventual
communist triumph. That summer he escorted Marx on a tour of
England. Thereafter he spent much time in Paris, where his
social engagements did not interfere significantly with his
major purpose, that of attempting to convert various émigré
German worker groups—among them a socialist secret society,
the League of the Just—as well as leading French socialists
to his and Marx’s views. When the league held its first
congress in London in June 1847, Engels helped bring about
its transformation into the Communist League.
Marx and he together persuaded a second Communist
Congress in London to adopt their views. The two men were
authorized to draft a statement of communist principles and
policies, which appeared in 1848 as the Manifest der
kommunistischen Partei (commonly called the Communist
Manifesto). It included much of the preliminary definition
of views prepared earlier by Engels in the Grundsätze des
Kommunismus (1847; Principles of Communism) but was
primarily the work of Marx.
The Revolution of 1848, which was precipitated by the
attempt of the German states to throw off an authoritarian,
almost feudal, political system and replace it with a
constitutional, representative form of government, was a
momentous event in the lives of Marx and Engels. It was
their only opportunity to participate directly in a
revolution and to demonstrate their flexibility as
revolutionary tacticians with the aim of turning the
revolution into a communist victory. Their major tool was
the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx edited in
Cologne with the able assistance of Engels. Such a party
organ, then appearing in a democratic guise, was of prime
importance for their purposes; with it they could furnish
daily guidelines and incitement in the face of shifting
events, together with a sustained criticism of governments,
parties, policies, and politicians.
After the failure of the revolution, Engels and Marx were
reunited in London, where they reorganized the Communist
League and drafted tactical directives for the communists in
the belief that another revolution would soon take place.
But how to replace his depleted income soon became Engels’
main problem. To support both himself and Marx, he accepted
a subordinate position in the offices of Ermen & Engels in
Manchester, eventually becoming a full-fledged partner in
the concern. He again functioned successfully as a
businessman, never allowing his communist principles and
criticism of capitalist ways to interfere with the
profitable operations of his firm. Hence he was able to send
money to Marx constantly, often in the form of £5 notes, but
later in far higher figures. When Engels sold his
partnership in the business in 1869, he received enough for
it to live comfortably until his death in 1895 and to
provide Marx with an annual grant of £350, with the promise
of more to cover all contingencies.
Engels, who was forced to live in Manchester,
corresponded constantly with Marx in London and frequently
wrote newspaper articles for him; he wrote the articles that
appeared in the New York Tribune (1851–52) under Marx’s name
and that were later published under Engels’ name as
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany in 1848 (1896).
In the informal division of labour that the two protagonists
of communism had established, Engels was the specialist in
nationality questions, military matters, to some extent in
international affairs, and in the sciences. Marx also turned
to him repeatedly for clarification of economic questions,
notably for information on business practices and industrial
operations.
Marx’s Das Kapital (Capital), his most important work,
bears in part a made-in-Manchester stamp. Marx similarly
called on Engels’ writing facility to help “popularize”
their joint views. While Marx was the brilliant theoretician
of the pair, it was Engels, as the apt salesman of Marxism
directing attention to Das Kapital through his reviews of
the book, who implanted the thought that it was their
“bible.” Engels almost alone wrote Herrn Eugen Dührings
Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1878; Herr Eugen Dühring’s
Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring]), the book that
probably did most to promote Marxian thought. It destroyed
the influence of Karl Eugen Dühring, a Berlin professor who
threatened to supplant Marx’s position among German Social
Democrats.
Last years
After Marx’s death (1883), Engels served as the foremost
authority on Marx and Marxism. Aside from occasional
writings on a variety of subjects and introductions to new
editions of Marx’s works, Engels completed volumes 2 and 3
of Das Kapital (1885 and 1894) on the basis of Marx’s
uncompleted manuscripts and rough notes. Engels’ other two
late publications were the books Der Ursprung der Familie,
des Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884; The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State) and Ludwig Feuerbach
und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (1888;
Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German
Philosophy). All the while he corresponded extensively with
German Social Democrats and followers everywhere, so as to
perpetuate the image of Marx and to foster some degree of
conformity among the “faithful.” His work was interrupted
when he was stricken with cancer; he died of the disease not
long after.
During his lifetime, Engels experienced, in a milder
form, the same attacks and veneration that fell upon Marx.
An urbane individual with the demeanour of an English
gentleman, Engels customarily was a gay and witty associate
with a great zest for living. He had a code of honour that
responded quickly to an insult, even to the point of
violence. As the hatchetman of the “partnership,” he could
be most offensive and ruthless, so much so that in 1848
various friends attempted unsuccessfully to persuade Marx to
disavow him.
Except for the communist countries, where Engels has
received due recognition, posterity has generally lumped him
together with Marx without adequately clarifying Engels’
significant role. The attention Engels does receive is
likely to be in the form of a close scrutiny of his works to
discover what differences existed between him and Marx. As a
result, some scholars have concluded that Engels’ writings
and influence are responsible for certain deviations from,
or distortions of, “true Marxism” as they see it. Yet
scholars in general acknowledge that Marx himself apparently
was unaware of any essential divergence of ideas and
opinions. The Marx-Engels correspondence, which reveals a
close cooperation in formulating Marxist policies, bears out
that view.
Oscar J. Hammen
