Engels, Friedrich

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH

(1820–1895), German socialist theoretician; close collaborator of Karl Marx.

Friedrich Engels is remembered primarily as the close friend and intellectual collaborator of Karl Marx, who was the most important socialist thinker and arguably the most important social theorist of the nineteenth century. Engels must be regarded as a significant intellectual figure in his own right. Engels's writings exerted a strong influence on Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. Engels was born in Barmen in 1820, two and a half years after Marx. Ironically, Friedrich Engels worked for decades as the manager of enterprises in his family's firm of Ermen and Engels; this necessitated his move to Manchester in 1850. Engels contributed substantially to the financial support of Marx and his family. He survived Marx by twelve years, during an important period in the growth of the socialist movement when Engels served as the most respected spokesman for Marxist theory.

In recent decades there has been a lively debate over the degree of divergence between Marx's thought and that of Engels, and therefore over whether the general scheme of interpretation known as "historical materialism" or "dialectical materialism" was primarily constructed by Engels or accorded with the main thrust of Marx's intellectual efforts. George Lichtheim and Shlomo Avineri, distinguished scholars who have written about Marx, see Engels as having given a rigid cast to Marxist theory in order to make it seem more scientific, thus implicitly denying the creative role of human imagination and labor that had been emphasized by Marx. On the other hand, some works, such as those by J. D. Hunley and Manfred Steger, emphasize the fundamental points of agreement between Marx and Engels. The controversy remains unresolved and facts point to both convergence and divergence: Marx and Engels coauthored some major essays, including The Communist Manifesto, and Engels made an explicit effort to give Marxism the character of a set of scientific laws of purportedly general validity. The well-known laws of the dialectic, which became the touchstones of philosophical orthodoxy in Soviet Marxism-Leninism, were drawn directly from Engels's writings.

See also: dialectical materialism; marxism

bibliography

Carver, Terrell. (1989). Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought. London: Macmillan.

Hunley, J. D. (1991). The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels: A Reinterpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Steger, Manfred B., and Carver, Terrell, eds. (1999). Engels after Marx. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Alfred B. Evans Jr.