ENGELS, FRIEDRICH

Collaborator with Karl Marx in propagandizing socialism; b. Barmen, Prussia, Nov. 28, 1820; d. London, Aug. 5, 1895. He was the oldest of eight children of Friedrich and Elise Engels, whose lineage can be traced in the state of Wuppertal as early as the end of the 16th century. At an early age Engels rebelled against the strict Prussian discipline and somber Lutheran piety in which he had been reared. Upon completion of high school in Elberfeld, he worked for a brief period in his father's textile mill. At the age of 17, at his father's insistence, he took a job as an unsalaried clerk in the export business of Consul Leupold in Bremen. Abundant free time, however, permitted him to develop his own preferences—reading and writing. He learned several languages (he boasted later of being able to converse in 25 tongues) and began contributing to many newspapers and magazines on a variety of subjects ranging from religion and philosophy to politics and military strategy, all self-taught.

The social consciousness that had its awakening in his firsthand experience with factory conditions in Barmen and later in his father's mill in Manchester, England, came to fruition in his association with Karl Marx, whom he met at Cologne in 1842. Marx was then editor of Rheinische Zeitung, a newspaper opposed to the government, which was suppressed by decree in 1843. Together Marx and Engels became political exiles in Switzerland, Paris, Brussels, and finally England.

Although Engels opposed marriage as a bourgeois institution and had no children, he finally married Lizzy Burns on her deathbed in 1878. He had previously lived with her sister Mary, an Irish revolutionary leader, from 1845 until her death in 1863. In 1869 he sold out his share of the Manchester firm and retired at 49; thus, when Marx died in 1883, he was able to devote all his time to editing Marx's Das Kapital. However, from 1870 to 1890, through correspondence, pamphlets and articles, and personal contacts, he continued to school leaders of the new and growing European working-class parties in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Roumania, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy, and finally Russia. Ironically, only England, his adopted homeland, and the U.S. remained outside his sphere of influence, largely because their trade-union and socialist movements believed in parliamentary solutions of economic problems and did not trust his revolutionary determinism.

When Engels died of cancer at his home in London, the proletarian class movement that he and Marx had begun and nurtured lost a dedicated chief of staff, whose talent for stimulating, disseminating, and popularizing highly complicated theories has rarely been equaled.

Engels' proliferation of letters to socialist leaders and articles in newspapers and magazines of almost every industrial center in the world gives a clear picture of his ideas and actions. Although Marx is recognized as the intellectual father of communist thought, Engels was its promulgator and missionary. Dialectical materialism for him filled the void left by his successive abandonment of Lutheranism and Hegelian statism, and he espoused the cause of political and social reform wherever it appeared likely to advance revolutionary communism.

Among his published works are The Holy Family (with Marx, 1843), The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), German Ideology (with Marx, 1845), Communist Manifesto (with Marx, 1848), Development of Socialism from Utopianism to Science (with Marx, 1876), and Marx's Das Kapital (ed., v.2 1885; v.3 1895).

Bibliography: d. b. goldendach, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, tr. j. kunitz (New York 1927). g. mayer, Friedrich Engels, tr. G. and h. highet (New York 1936).

[g. w. gruenberg]