ENGELS, FRIEDRICH. - German socialist, b. at Barmen on 28 Nov. 1820, and d. in London on 5 Aug. 1895. Of a well-to-do family, he completed his studies at the lyceum of his native city; but he had to interrupt them at the age of eighteen for family reasons, and became a clerk in a commercial house in Bremen: which did not prevent him from continuing to study with tenacity. He was at first a fervent Hegelian, of the current of the "Young Hegelians," or "Hegelian left," which interpreted Hegelianism in its revolutionary dialectical meaning. But when, in 1841, Feuerbach's book, The Essence of Christianity, appeared, in which the author took a clearly materialist position, he became a Feuerbachian. In 1842 he went to England, and that stay marked a most important turning point in his life: until then E. had remained a left-wing democrat, a bourgeois revolutionary; in England he became a "proletarian" revolutionary. In Sept. 1844 in Paris he settled per recto del rev. p. Abate
ENGELBERG
Front side of the Romanesque cross (13th century).
between E. and Marx there arose a very close friendship and collaboration. Under E.'s influence, Marx's philosophical concerns turned to the problems of political economy. Thus it was that the revolutionary proletarian tendencies, until then generically idealistic and "utopian," found through their work a "scientific" basis, of which the first expression was the Manifesto of the Communist Party of Feb. 1848, published at the request of the "League of the Communists." Between Marx and E. the communion of action and thought became complete.
E.'s principal works, entirely his own, are: Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England (1845), Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (1883), Die Arbeiterbewegung in Amerika (1887), L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (1888), Kunst Europa abridten? (1894). But even when Marx and E. collaborated on one and the same writing, the part owed to the one and to the other is often distinguishable: thus in Die Heilige Familie (1844), in Herrn E. Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1848), in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums u. des Staats (1884), where there are fragments by Marx. Indeed, even in the community of theoretical and practical activity, which seemed to many almost to make of two men and two intellectuals a single one, there are also at times notable differences of tendencies and attitudes: as is shown above all by the very copious correspondence with which E. directed the socialist movement during the twelve years of his survival of Marx. In that period he also oversaw the publication of the 2nd and 3rd volumes of Capital (1885-89).
Bibliography20 works
Celestino Melzi