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German writer Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) is best known as the life-long friend and sometime collaborator of the revolutionary social theorist Karl Marx (1818–1883), whose ideas produced epochal changes in the way that politics is conceived and practiced.

Engels was born in what is now Wuppertal near Düsseldorf in Prussia. His family were pious Christians who had become moderately wealthy over several generations of factory ownership and commercial trading. His education was terminated at sixteen so he could enter the family firm, and he worked at their enterprises in the port of Bremen and also in Manchester, England. However, young Engels was a rebel and autodidact, sympathizing with liberal resistance to the authoritarian regimes of the German states. While this was confined by monarchical governments to the cultural spheres of literature and philosophy, Engels was unusual in publishing an anonymous exposé titled “Letters from Wuppertal” in a Hamburg journal at the age of eighteen. In this prescient work he detailed, with great sarcasm, the pious hypocrisies of mill owners whose wealth derived from the sufferings of subsistence laborers and whose factories spilled waste into local streams. This outlook permeates Engels’s impressive and influential book The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in Leipzig in 1845 and praised by Marx. Engels’s more theoretical article, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” was accepted by Marx for a radical German-language volume published in Paris in 1844. It clearly influenced the then-obscure Marx, who later wrote Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867).

Together Marx and Engels produced only three major works: the little-read book The Holy Family with separately authored chapters, published in Frankfurt am Main in 1845; the voluminous manuscripts written in 1845–1846 and only posthumously published as The German Ideology (1932); and the eventually well-known Manifesto of the Communist Party, published anonymously in London in 1848. From 1845 onward the two had an intensive political collaboration, a very extensive correspondence, and an important monetary relationship. After 1850 Engels supported the Marx family out of his earnings and pension.

From 1859 Engels functioned as Marx’s chief reviewer and publicist, setting a biographical, intellectual, and political frame around Marx’s works and ideas. While on occasion Marx provided brief summaries of his outlook and conclusions, Engels’s popularizations created a systematizing conceptual structure. This gave currency to the terms that made Marxism a distinctive intellectual system: materialism, idealism, dialectic, and contradiction. According to Engels’s influential accounts, Marx was the equal of German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel because Marx was said to have similarly generated a philosophy of nature, history, and thought itself and of British naturalist Charles Darwin because both were said to have constructed a positive science through which the progressive development of human history could be understood. After Marx’s death Engels edited and republished numerous works by Marx with new introductions.

Engels presented his relationship to Marx as that of junior partner or second fiddle. However, this is perhaps somewhat disingenuous and has been under scrutiny almost since his death.

Bibliography:

Arthur, Christopher J., ed. Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996.
Carver, Terrell. Engels: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship. Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983.
Henderson, W. O. The Life of Friedrich Engels. 2 vols. London: Frank Cass, 1976.
Hunt, Tristram. The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
Steger, Manfred B., and Terrell Carver, eds. Engels after Marx. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.