Engels, Friedrich
Engels, Friedrich
Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen, Germany, in 1820 and died in London in 1895. He was the closest friend of Karl Marx and cofounder of so-called scientific socialism.
Engels was the oldest son in a family of eight children. His father owned a cotton-spinning mill in Barmen and was a partner in another spinning mill, Ermen and Engels, of Manchester and Engels-kirchen. Engels attended the Realschule in Barmen and the Gymnasium in Elberfeld. To prepare himself for the study of jurisprudence, he studied mercantile problems, first in his father’s firm, and then, from 1838 to 1841, in Bremen. Engels then did a year’s military service.
He was greatly impressed in his youth with the contrast between the pietistic Calvinism of the middle class in his native city and the misery of the working class, demoralized by drink. Using the pseudonym of Oswald he wrote about this situation in his “Briefe aus dem Wuppertal” (1839), a vivid description of these conditions that shows how early his literary and journalistic ability developed. Little by little he turned away from pietism and religion, strongly influenced by David Friedrich Strauss’s critique of the Gospels in Das Leben ]esu and, above all, by Ludwig Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christentums. He affirmed his radical break with religion in his Schelling und die Offen-barung (1842a) and in his spirited, witty satire, Schelling, der Philosoph in Christo (1842&). These were writings in part aimed at the king of Prussia, who had appointed Schelling to the University of Berlin as Hegel’s successor, hoping that he would become the intellectual exponent of his “Christian state.” Engels read political criticisms by the members of the “Junge Deutschland,” particularly those of Ludwig Börne, and he began to write as a Young Hegelian, one of that group of left-wing intellectuals in Berlin that included the brothers Edgar and Bruno Bauer and the anarchist Max Stirner. Karl Marx also belonged to this group while he was a student in Berlin. Engels’ satirical Christian epic, “Die frech bedräute, jedoch wun-derbar befreite Bibel: Oder Triumph des Glaubens” (1842c), which was published anonymously, reflected the views of this group. Engels wrote this work when the king of Prussia withdrew Bruno Bauer’s venia legendi at the University of Bonn because of his criticism of the Gospels. It was Moses Hess who guided Engels to the work of the early French socialists such as Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier and boasted that he had transformed this “revolutionary of the year 1” (i.e., 1793) into a communist.
Engels moved to Manchester in October 1842 to complete his commercial training. He criticized English political and social conditions in the Rhei-nische Zeitung, to which he had contributed since March 1842. At the same time he also wrote for the periodicals of the Chartists and Owenites, describing the development of socialism on the Continent. He supplemented his empirical observations by studying the English economists. In his brilliant “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie” (1844), which appeared in the Deutsch-Franzo-sische Jahrbücher, edited by Marx and the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, there is, according to Marx, an early formulation of the general principles of scientific socialism. Engels here demonstrated the contradictions in liberal economic doctrine and showed that all economic phenomena are, in the end, based on private property. He demanded that private property be abolished. After the publication of this essay, Marx and Engels began to correspond. When they met in Paris in the autumn of 1844, they found, according to Engels, that they were in “complete agreement in all theoretical areas.”
There are similarities in the early development of Marx and Engels that seem, on the surface, astonishing: a common literary and poetic bent, a common concern with religious problems, and a similar involvement in juridical-political discussion that led both of them from left-wing Hegel-ianism to communism. But it was, of course, the situation in Germany during that time that largely determined their common concerns, especially the authoritarianism of Friedrich Wilhelm iv and the political radicalization of the German intellectuals that was a reaction to it. Marx and Engels went beyond bourgeois-liberal criticism, however, thus parting from their former friends, whom they subjected to merciless criticism in The Holy Family (1845a), mainly written by Marx, and The German Ideology (1845-1846), published posthumously. Their reasons for becoming communists were not identical, to be sure. Engels was brought to the point of revolutionary outrage by his observation of the workers’ misery, while Marx, the rationalist, identified the proletariat as the only class that might be fitted by its extreme misery to effect a revolutionary transformation. More subject as Engels was to intense personal and emotional impressions, he always remained second in achievement to Marx. He phrased this aptly himself: “I could never have achieved what Marx did. Marx stood higher, saw farther, and had a broader and quicker grasp of a situation than all the rest of us. Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented” ([1886] 1941, p. 292).
This estimate, however, should not let us overlook the fact that at the beginning of their collaboration it was Engels who was the leading partner, precisely because he assimilated knowledge readily and because his occupation brought him much closer to economics. This is illustrated by The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845fo), which was planned as a chapter of a comprehensive social history of England. This work by the “doubtless most talented and well-informed of all German writers on sociology,” as Hildebrand called him ([1848] 1922, p. 170), is according to Lorenz von Stein, “a picture of the deepest poverty, taken from the dirtiest district of the dirtiest factory town in England, full of incontrovertible facts from this most miserable sphere of the industrial world, beyond any question the best invective ever written in Germany against industrial society and its conditions, a partisan book like no other. That is why the book had so powerful an effect, much more convincing by its exaggerations and errors than by its truths, as is the fate of all such works” (1852, p. 538).
After he and Marx began to work together, Engels seems intentionally to have left to Marx theoretical work, thus acknowledging (and later expressly emphasizing) that the elaboration of the materialist conception of history was essentially Marx’s work. He himself took credit for only a “very small part” thereof, asserting that most of the basic ideas, especially in the economic and historical fields, and more particularly their final acute formulations, were due to Marx. While Marx was writing the important theory sections of The German Ideology and was criticizing Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847a), Engels was engaged as an agitator. As early as 1843 he had established contact in London with the leaders of a German secret society, the League of the Just. At the end of 1844 he and Moses Hess held communist meetings in the Rhineland, until such meetings were suppressed. In Brussels, where he moved in April 1845 in order to be close to Marx, he was mainly active in the International Communist Committee of Correspondence, founded by Marx and himself. In August 1846 he went to Paris, where after prolonged discussions he succeeded in weaning the local group of the League of the Just from the influence of Wilhelm Weitling, the early German socialist, and P. J. Proudhon, the French anarchist. At the first congress of the League in London in June 1847, he succeeded in transforming it into the Communist League. The second congress, in the fall of 1847, commissioned him and Marx to draw up a party program. Engels prepared a draft of such a program, Principles of Communism (1847i>), written in the form of a catechism. It is significant as a draft of the famous Communist Manifesto (1848), but the Manifesto itself clearly bears the intellectual and stylistic stamp of Marx.
After the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, Engels and Marx went to Cologne. There Engels worked as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (published by Marx), since journalism was easier for him than for Marx. At various times there was a warrant out for his arrest because of his journalistic activity. He also participated in the Elberfeld civil insurrection, but its leaders repudiated him as a “Red.” After the suspension of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in May 1849, he vainly endeavored, together with Marx, to expand the armed uprising in Baden and the Palatinate into a general German revolution. After the uprising collapsed he left for Switzerland and, in October 1849, for London. He portrayed these events in series of articles published in 1849 and 1850.
In London Engels wrote The Peasant War in Germany (1850). He hoped that the revolutionary traditions of the peasants might pave the way for a new German revolution, and he was convinced that the success of such a revolution depended on supporting the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the peasants’ war of the sixteenth century. Engels’ characterization of Thomas Mün-zer, one of the leaders of that revolt, reveals his insight into his own position. He believed that M?nzer had been in a hopeless position: he was the leader of an extremist party, forced to take over a government prematurely, before the dominance of the class he represented could be accepted, and before the measures that the rule of his party implied could successfully be carried out ([1850] 1956, pp. 138-139).
Engels, nevertheless, made a very intensive study of the wars of the French Revolution after 1792 to prepare himself for the military leadership of the future revolution. He expounded principles of revolutionary action in a series of articles, Germany: Revolution and Counter-revolution (1851-1852), the authorship of which was wrongly attributed to Marx. Engels’ maxims were never to play with insurrection and always to act with the greatest resoluteness and to seize the offensive.
The defensive is the death of every armed rising; surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily; keep up the moral ascendancy which the first successful rising has given you; rally those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse, and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known: “de I’audace, de Vaudace, encore de I’audace.” (Engels [1851-1852] 1933, p. 100)
From 1854 until 1870, when Engels was an employee and then a partner in his father’s firm in Manchester, his writings dealt primarily with military science and earned him the sobriquet “General” among his friends. In the future proletarian revolution he was presumably cast for a role comparable to that of Carnot, the organizer of the levee en masse and the army of the French Revolution. He contributed articles to the New American Encyclopedia on the army, cavalry, fortifications, infantry, the navy, and so on. As a journalist he repeatedly described the armies of the various countries and evaluated their combat effectiveness. However, his writings went beyond topical journalism. He also concerned himself, in detail, with armaments, with the radical changes in warfare produced by the new industrial technology, and with the political implications of these developments (1859-1861). Thus he advocated expansion of the war of France and Italy against Austria into a German war against Napoleon in, whom he saw as the main adversary of the revolution. His Die preussische Militdrfräge und die deutsche Arbeiter-partei (1865) was also primarily political: in the Prussian constitutional conflict over expansion of the army, he opposed Ferdinand Lassalle’s complete dissociation of the interests of the workers from those of the middle class.
The most important evidence for Engels’ activities in this period is his correspondence with Marx, which shows Engels’ continuing financial assistance to Marx as well as his encouragement of Marx’s writings. Engels’ loyal friendship even led him to assume the paternity of Marx’s illegitimate son, although this was also an expression of his unconventional conception of relations between the sexes. He himself lived for nearly twenty years with Mary Burns, an Irish working girl, and after her death in 1863 he lived with her sister Lizzy, marrying her only on her deathbed in 1878.
After he moved from Manchester to London in the autumn of 1870, Engels became a member of the General Council of the First International (founded in 1864) and its corresponding secretary for Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and for a time, Belgium. He played a prominent part in the dispute with Bakunin. He wrote L’alliance de la démocratic socialiste et I!association Internationale des travail-leurs (1873b) together with Marx and “Die Baku-nisten an der Arbeit” (see 1873a) by himself. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878) was aimed at Dühring’s strong influence on German social democracy. Notwithstanding its polemics, it was the first popular exposition widely to promote the teachings of Marx. His Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), a summary of the first three chapters of the Anti-Dühring, was even more popular.
Up to the death of Marx on March 14, 1883, Engels’ major effort was devoted to the incomplete Dialectics of Nature (1873-1883). Conceived initially as an argument with Ludwig Büchner, it became an attack on the kind of metaphysics in the natural sciences that regarded natural phenomena as immutable, instead of considering them as ever-flowing, changing facts. By including the natural sciences, Engels made dialectics a “science of all interrelationships” and went beyond Marx’s materialist conception of history to the Weltanschauung of “dialectical materialism.” Engels extended the original concept yet further to include prehistory in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884a). This work, written after Marx’s death, was based on L. H. Morgan’s Ancient Society of 1877 and on Marx’s synopsis of Morgan’s book—in fulfillment of a legacy, so to speak.
After Marx’s death Engels edited Volume 2 of Capital and prepared Volume 3 for the press, using the outlines left by Marx and making some studies of his own. No critical analysis of the extent of Engels’ contributions to Capital has yet been made.
Engels took care of Marx’s works in general, arranging new editions, providing them with his own prefaces, and defending Marx against learned attacks. This greatly overshadowed his own literary activity. Yet he did make important contributions to the history of Marxism: “Marx und die Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (1884i>); “History of the Communist League” (1885); and Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1886). In the last years of his life, Engels wrote an important series of letters to Conrad, Schmidt, Bloch, Mehring, and Borgius in which he admitted the possibility that the superstructure could affect the economic infrastructure and thus opposed an overemphasis upon the regularity of historical events. This significant theoretical clarification had a considerable influence upon developments in the Soviet Union.
Engels was Marx’s political as well as his literary heir. He played a very important part in the genesis of the Second International in 1889. He continued to act as an adviser to the various socialist parties, through Marx’s son-in-law Lafarge in France and through Liebknecht, Bebel, and Bernstein in Germany. His forcing the party to publish Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875-1891), which condemned the theoretical concessions of the Lassalleans, led to violent intraparty disputes. In his “Introduction” to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (1895), Engels still defended revolutionary tactics despite the great successes achieved by social democracy after the establishment of universal suffrage. To be sure, he did stress that they must be different from earlier tactics: “The time is past for a revolutionary surprise attack carried out by small conscious minorities at the head of the uncomprehending masses.” He attributed special importance to the problem of disarmament (1893) and foresaw the possibility of a future world war. He was stricken with cancer of the esophagus in the midst of his work.
In the influence exerted by Marxism, Engels’ work continues to play its part. The extent of the effect of his military-scientific writings on, say, the Russian or the Chinese revolutions cannot yet be assessed, nor has scholarly work distinguishing between his specific views and those of Marx proceeded very far; in view of the decisive influence of Marx and the way in which these thinkers stimulated each other, this distinction is extremely difficult to draw. However, in the intellectual history of Marxism one might say that Engels represented its descent from early socialism, especially early French socialism, while Marx gave it the imprint of classical German philosophy.
Thilo Ramm
[For the historical context of Engels’ work, seeMARXISM; REVOLUTION; SOCIALISM; and the biographies ofBAKUNIN; FOURIER; MARX; MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY; PROUDHON; SAINT-SIMON. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, see the biographies ofBERNSTEIN; KAUTSKY; LENIN; TROTSKY.]
WORKS BY ENGELS
(1839) 1930 Briefe aus dem Wuppertal. By F. Oswald [pseud.]. Section 1, volume 2, pages 23-118 in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Ge-samtausgabe: Werke, Schriften, Briefe. Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag. ? First published in Telegraph für Deutschland.
(1839-1895a) 1927-1935 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Schriften, Briefe. 12 vols. Edited by David Riazanov; commissioned by the Marx-Engels Institute, Moscow. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Moscow: Marx-Engels Verlag. -> Includes manuscripts published posthumously.
(1839-1895b) 1956 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke. Volume 1. Berlin: Dietz. ? The first volumes of a projected 36-volume edition.
1842a Schelling und die Offenbarung. Leipzig: Bamberg. ? Published anonymously.
1842b Schelling, der Philosoph in Christo: Oder die Verklärung der Weltweisheit zur Gottesweisheit. Berlin: Eyssenhardt. ? Published anonymously.
(1842c) 1930 Die frech bedräute, jedoch wunderbar be-freite Bibel: Oder Triumph des Glaubens. Section 1, volume 2, pages 173-281 in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Schriften, Briefe. Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag. ? Published anonymously.
(1843-1895) 1956 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
(1844) 1930 Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalokono-mie. Section 1, volume 2, pages 379-404 in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, Schriften, Briefe. Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag. ? First published in the Deutsch—Franzijsische Jahrbücher.
(1845a) 1956 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH The Holy Family. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ? First published as Die heilige Familie.
(1845b) 1958 The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Blackwell. -> First published as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England.
(1845-1846) 1939 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH The German Ideology. Parts 1 and 3. With an introduction by R. Pascal. New York: International Publishers. ? Written in 1845-1846, the full text was first published in 1932 as Die deutsche Ideologic and re-published by Dietz Verlag in 1953.
(1847a) 1963 Introduction. In Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers. ? First published in French. A paperback edition was published in 1964.
(1847b) 1952’ Principles of Communism. New York: Monthly Review. -> Written in 1847; first published posthumously in 1914 as Grundsatze des Kommunis-mus, edited by Eduard Bernstein.
(1848) 1963 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH The Communist Manifesto. New York: Russell. ? A paperback edition was published in 1964 by Washington Square Press.
(1848-1898) 1962 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Selected Works. 2 vols. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. -> Includes works published posthumously.
(1850) 1956 The Peasant War in Germany. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ? First published as “Der deutsche Bauernkrieg” in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Revue.
(1851-1852) 1933 Germany: Revolution and Counterrevolution. New York: International Publishers. -> First published as a series of articles in the New York Daily Tribune.
(1852) 1960 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Die grossen Manner des Exils. Volume 8, pages 233-335 in Kari Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke. Berlin: Dietz. ? First published in 1930, in Russian. Written in 1852.
(1859-1861) 1915 Po und Rhein; Savoyen, Nizza und der Rhein. Edited by Eduard Bernstein. Stuttgart (Germany): Dietz. -> Published anonymously.
(1865) 1963 Die preussische Militärfrage und die deutsche Arbeiterpartei. Berlin: Dietz.
(1870-1871) 1923 Notes on the War. Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung. ? Contains sixty articles reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette.
(1873a) 1957 Internationales aus dem Volksstaat (1871-1875). Berlin: Dietz. -> See especially Chapter 2 on “Die Bakunisten an der Arbeit.”
1873b L’alliance de la démocratic socialiste et Vassocia-tion Internationale des travailleurs. London and Hamburg. ? A leaflet.
(1873-1883) 1960 Dialectics of Nature. New York: International Publishers. ? First published in German.
(1875-1891) 1959 MARX, KARL; and ENGELS, FRIEDRICH Critique of the Gotha Programme. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ? Written by Marx in 1875 as “Randglossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei.” First published with notes by Engels in 1891.
(1878) 1959 Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ? First published as “Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenschaft” in Vorwdrts (Leipzig).
(1880) 1935 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. New York: International Publishers. ? First published in French.
(1884a) 1942 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers. ? First published as Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats.
(1884b) 1934 Marx und die Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Volume 2, pages 27-37 in Karl Marx, Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by V. Adoratskij. Zurich (Switzerland): Ring. ? First published in Der Sozialdemo-krat.
(1885) 1933 History of the Communist League. Pages 120-131 in Friedrich Engels, Germany: Revolution and Counter-revolution. New York: International Publishers. ? First published as “Zur Geschichte des Bundes der Kommunisten” in Der Sozialdemokrat and added to the 1933 edition of Engels 1851-1852.
(1886) 1941 Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. New York: International Publishers. ? First published in German.
(1891) 1963 Introduction. In Karl Marx, The Civil War in France. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ? First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1964 by International Publishers.
1893 Kann Europa abrüsten? Nürnberg (Germany): Worlein.
(1895) 1964 Introduction. In Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850. New York: International Publishers.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, Max (1920) 1925 Engels als Denker. 2d ed. Berlin: Dietz.
Berlin, Isaiah (1939) 1963 Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. 3d ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Bollnow, Hermann 1954 Engels’ Auffassung von Revolution und Entwicklung in semen Grundsätzen des Kommunismus (1847). Volume 1, pages 77-144 in Marxismusstudien. Schriften der Evangelischen Stu-diengemeinschaft, No. 3. Tübingen (Germany): Mohr.
BÜNGER, SIEGFRIED 1962 Friedrich Engels und die bri-tische sozialistiche Beivegung, 1881-1895. Berlin: Rütten & Loening.
Coaxes, Zelda (KAHAN) (1920) 1945 The Life and Teachings of Friedrich Engels. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ? First published as The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels.
Cornu, Auguste 1955-1962 Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels: Leur vie et leur oeuvre. Paris: Presses Uni-versitaires de France.
Fetscher, Iring 1957 Von der Philosophic des Proletariats zur proletarischen Weltanschauung. Volume 2, pages 26-60 in Marxismusstudien. Schriften der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, No. 5. Tübingen (Germany): Mohr.
Friedrich Engels: Der Denker. (1935) 1945 Basel: Mun-dus. ? First published in Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklo-pedüa.
[GOLDENDACH, DAVID B.] 1927 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, by D. Riazanov [pseud.]. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Hildebrand, Bruno (1848) 1922 Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft, und andere gesam-melte Schriften. Jena: Fischer.
Kautsky, Karl (1895)1899 Friedrich Engels: His Life, His Work and His Writings. Chicago: Kerr. -> First published in German.
Lucas, Erhard 1964 Die Rezeption Lewis H. Morgans durch Marx und Engels. Saeculum 15:153-176.
Lucas, Erhard 1964 Marx’ und Engels’ Auseinander-setzung mit Darwin: Zur Differenz zwischen Marx und Engels. International Review of Social History (Amsterdam) [1964]:433-469.
Marek, Franz (1950) 1953 Friedrich Engels: Denker und Kiimpfer. Leipzig: Fachbuch Verlag.
Mayer, Gustav (1920-1934) 1936 Friedrich Engels: A Biography. Introduction by G. D. H. Cole. London: Chapman. ? First published in German. The best biography of Engels.
Ramm, Thilo 1957 Die kiinftige Gesellschaftsordnung nach der Theorie von Marx und Engels. Volume 2, pages 26-60 in Marxismusstudien. Schriften der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, No. 5. Tübingen (Germany): Mohr.
Rubel, Maximilien 1956 Bibliographie des oeuvres de Karl Marx: Avec en appendice un répertoire des oeuvres de Friedrich Engels. Paris: Riviére. ? A 74-page supplement was published in 1960.
Seeger, Reinhard 1935 Friedrich Engels als “junger Deutscher” …. Halle (Germany): Klinz.
Stein, Lorenz Von 1852 Der Sozialismus in Deutsch-land. Gegenwart: Eine encyklopädische Darstellung der neuesten Zeitgeschichte für alle Stände 7:517-563. ? Translation of the extract in the text was provided by Thilo Ramm.
Thier, Erich 1954 Etappen der Marxinterpretation. Volume 1, pages 1-38 in Marxismusstudien. Schriften der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, No. 3. Tübingen (Germany): Mohr.