Friedrich Engels
_Philosopher |
region = Western Philosophy |
era =
19th-century philosophy |
color = #B0C4DE |
image_name = Engelss56fe1.jpg |
image_caption = Friedrich Engels|
name = Friedrich Engels |
birth =
November 28,
1820 (
Wuppertal,
Germany) | death =
August 5,
1895 (
London,
England) | school_tradition =
Marxism | main_interests =
Politics,
Economics,
class struggle | influences =
Kant,
Hegel,
Feuerbach,
Stirner,
Smith,
Ricardo,
Rousseau,
Goethe,
Fourier | influenced =
Luxemburg,
Lenin,
Trotsky,
Mao,
Guevara,
Sartre,
Debord,
Frankfurt School,
Negri,
more... | notable_ideas = Co-founder of
Marxism (with
Karl Marx),
alienation and exploitation of the worker,
historical materialism |}}
Friedrich Engels (
November 28,
1820,
Wuppertal â€"
August 5,
1895,
London), a
19th-century German political philosopher, developed
communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator,
Karl Marx, co-authoring
The Communist Manifesto (1848). Engels also edited several volumes of
Das Kapital after Marx's death.
Born in Barmen-Elberfeld (now
Wuppertal in
North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) as the eldest son of a successful German textile industrialist, Engels became involved in radical journalism as a teenager (Carver 2003:3). His father sent the young Engels to
England in 1842 to help manage his cotton factory in
Manchester. Shocked by the widespread
poverty, Engels began writing an account which he published in 1845 as
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 ([
1]).
In the same year Engels began contributing to the journal
Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, which
Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx edited and published in
Paris. After Engels and Marx first met in person in September 1844 they discovered that they had similar views on
philosophy and on
capitalism, and decided to work more closely together. Their first common work, the book
Die heilige Familie (
The Holy Family), a polemic mainly written by Marx, attacked Marx's former mentor and friend
Bruno Bauer and his circle. This book appeared in March 1845, about the time when Marx wrote the
Theses on Feuerbach in his notebook.
After the French authorities deported Marx from
France in January 1845, Engels and Marx decided to move to
Belgium, which then permitted greater
freedom of expression than some other countries in
Europe.
|
Friedrich Engels as a soldier |
In July 1845 Engels took Marx to England. There he met an Irish working-class woman named Mary Burns (
Crosby), with whom he lived until her death in 1863 (Carver 2003:19). Later he lived with her sister, Lizzie. marrying her the day before she died in 1877 (Carver 2003:42). These women may have introduced him to the
Chartist movement, of whose leaders he met several, including
George Harney.
Engels and Marx returned to
Brussels in January 1846, where they set up the Communist Correspondence Committee. They planned to unite
socialist leaders living in different parts of Europe. Influenced by Marx's ideas, socialists in England held a conference in London in June 1847 and formed a new organization: the
Communist League. Engels attended as a delegate and had a great impact on the developed strategy of action.
In 1847 Engels and Marx began writing a pamphlet together, based on Engels'
The Principles of Communism. They completed the 12,000-word pamphlet in six weeks, writing it in such a manner as to make communism understandable to a wide audience, and published it as
The Communist Manifesto in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled both Engels and Marx. They moved to
Cologne, where they began to publish a radical newspaper, the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Engels actively participated in the
Revolution of 1848, taking part in the uprising at
Elberfeld. Engels fought in the
Baden campaign against the
Prussians (June/July 1849) as the
aide-de-camp of
August Willich, who commanded a Free Corps in the Baden-Palatinate uprising. [
2]
By 1849 both Engels and Marx had to leave Germany and moved to London. The Prussian authorities applied pressure on the British government to expel the two men, but
Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused. With only the money that Engels could raise, the Marx family lived in extreme poverty.
In remembrance of the historical democratic and socialist movements in Germany in 1848/1849, the
German social psychologist Richard Albrecht read a public lecture in Cologne (Rhineland), 150 years later in 1988, on the specific role Frederick Engels played as an anti-Prussian partisan and counterpart of the Prussian police agent Dr Wilhelm Stieber (alias Schmidt). This scholarly piece first appeared in print in 2000 (
Almanach der Varnhagen-Gesellschaft, ed. Dr. Nikolaus Gatter, vol. 1 (2000), 197-208, Berlin: Verlag Arno Spitz ISBN 3-8305-0025-4; but it became available online free of charge in 2004. It gives insights into the personality of Frederick Engels (nicknamed "the general") before, during and after his emigration (first to Basel in Switzerland, then to Manchester): see "Gegenspieler - Der General und sein Schatten: Engels, Stieber & die preußische Reaktion 1851/52. Historischer Bericht zum ersten Kommunistenprozeß zu Köln" [Counterparts - The General and His Shadow: Engels, Stieber & the Prussian Reactionary Forces, 1851/52. Another look at the first "Colonial Communist Trial"]
http://www.hausarbeiten.de/unicum/hausarbeit/jul/25110.htmlIn order to help provide Marx with an income, Engels returned to work for his father in
Manchester, before moving back to
London in 1870. After Marx's
death in 1883, Engels devoted much of the rest of his life to editing and translating Marx's writings. However, he also contributed significantly to
feminist theory, seeing for instance the concept of
monogamous marriage as having arisen because of the domination of man over women. In this sense, he ties communist theory to the family, arguing that men have dominated women just as the capitalist class has dominated workers.
Engels died in London in 1895, childless. Following cremation at
Woking, his ashes were scattered off
Beachy Head, as he had requested
[ ODNB Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Engels, Friedrich (1820â€"1895)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 20 June 2006].
Engels had a reputation as an avid bird-breeder.
*
Cola di Rienzi 1840?/1974
*
Letters from Wuppertal [
3]
*
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 *
Anti-Dühring [
4]
*
Dialectics of Nature [
5]
*
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy [
6]
*
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State [
7]
*
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany [
8]
*
The German Ideology (with Marx) [
9]
*
The Holy Family (with Marx) [
10]
*
The Peasant War in Germany [
11]
*
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific [
12]
*
Karl Marx*
Marxism*
Das Kapital* Carver, Terrell:
Engels: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univarity Press, 2003.
* Crosby, Danny: "Engels in Manchester" on the
BBC website; retrieved on 17 June 2006.
*
The Marx & Engels Internet Archive at
Marxists.org.
**
Marx/Engels Biographical Archive*
Marx and Engels in their native German language*
Free ebook of Friedrich Engels at
Project Gutenberg*
Libcom.org/library Frederick Engels archive*
The Legend of Marx, or "Engels the founder" by
Maximilien Rubel
