FRIEDRICH ENGELS. - German socialist, b. at Barmen on 28 Nov. 1820, d. at London on 3 Aug. 1895. Of a well-to-do family, he completed his studies at the grammar school of his native town; but he had to interrupt them at the age of twenty for family reasons, and became a clerk in a commercial house at Bremen, which did not prevent him from continuing his studies with great zeal. At first he was a fervent Hegelian of the school of the Young Hegelians, or "Left Hegelians," who interpreted Hegelianism in its revolutionary dialectical sense. When, in 1847, Feuerbach’s book *The Essence of Christianity* appeared, in which the author took a clearly materialist position, Engels became a Feuerbachian. In 1842 he went to England, and this sojourn marked an important turning-point in his life: until then Engels had remained a left-wing democrat, a bourgeois revolutionary; in England he became a "proletarian" revolutionary.
In September 1844 in Paris a close friendship and collaboration began between Engels and Marx, which was to last all their lives. Under Engels’s influence, Marx’s philosophical preoccupations turned to the problems of political economy. Thus the revolutionary proletarian tendencies, which until then had been generically idealistic and utopian, found in their work a scientific basis, of which the first expression was the *Communist Manifesto* of February 1848, published at the request of the Communist League. Between Marx and Engels the communion of action and thought became complete.
Engels’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), *Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie* (1888), *Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats* (1884). Even when Marx and Engels collaborated on the same work, the part contributed by each is often distinguishable: thus in *Die heilige Familie* (1844), in *Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft* (1878), and in *Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats* (1884), there are fragments by Marx. Despite their theoretical and practical activity in common, which to many seemed to make of the two men and their intellects a single entity, there were also sometimes notable differences of tendency and attitude, as is shown above all by the very copious correspondence with which Engels directed the socialist movement during the twelve years following Marx’s death. In that period he also supervised the publication of Volumes II and III of *Capital* (1885–89).
For Engels’s life, works, and thought: K. Kautsky, *Fr. Engels*, Berlin 1895; C. Turgeon, *La conception matérialiste de l’histoire d’après Marx et Engels*, Rennes 1909; R. Mondolfo, *Il materialismo storico in F. Engels*, Genoa 1912, revised ed., Rome 1940; F. Mehring, *Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von K. Marx, Fr. Engels und F. Lassalle*, 2 vols., Stuttgart 1913; E. Di Carlo, *Fr. Engels: l’interpretazione e la critica di alcune dottrine di Marx e di Engels*, Palermo 1915; E. Drahn, *Fr. Engels*, Berlin 1920; M. Adler, *Engels als Denker*, 1912; K. Vorländer, *Marx, Engels und Lassalle. Ihre Philosophien*, 3 vols., 1912; R. Seeger, *Fr. Engels*, Halle 1935; W. Victor, *Engels und die Frauen...*, Zurich 1917; D. Riazanov, *Marx and Engels*, Italian trans., Milan 1945; G. A. Wetter, *Il materialismo dialettico sovietico*, Turin 1948, passim. Celestino Meiss