ENGELS, FRIEDRICH. — German socialist, b. in Barmen on 28 November 1820, and d. in London on 5 August 1895. Born into a prosperous family, he completed his studies at the grammar school 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 firm in Bremen—which did not prevent him from continuing to study assiduously. At first he was an ardent Hegelian, belonging to the movement of the “Young Hegelians,” or “Hegelian Left,” which interpreted Hegelianism in its revolutionary dialectical meaning. But when Feuerbach’s book, The Essence of Christianity, appeared in 1841, in which the author adopted a clearly materialist position, he became a Feuerbachian. In 1842 he went to England, and that stay marked an extremely 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 September 1844 he settled in Paris
for recto of the Rev. Father 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 toward the problems of political economy. Thus the revolutionary proletarian tendencies, until then generically idealist and “utopian,” found through their work a “scientific” foundation, whose first expression was the Manifesto of the Communist Party of February 1848, published at the request of the “Communist League.” Between Marx and E., the community of action and thought became complete.
E.’s principal works, entirely his own, are: Die Lage der arbeitenden Kissen 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 the same work, it is often possible to distinguish the part attributable to one from that attributable to the other: thus in Die Heilige Familie (1844), in Herrn E. Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (1848), and in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums u. des Staats (1884), which contains fragments by Marx. Despite the community of theoretical and practical activity, which in the eyes of many seemed almost to make two men and two intellectuals into one, there were also sometimes considerable differences in tendencies and attitudes: this is demonstrated above all by the extremely extensive correspondence through which E. directed the socialist movement during the twelve years he survived Marx. During that period he also edited the publication of the second and third volumes of Das Kapital (1885–89).