Friedrich Engels

German philosopher, social theorist and industrialist (1820–1895), born in Barmen into a family of prosperous and pious textile manufacturers, he was sent as a young man to manage the Manchester branch of the family business, an experience that allowed him to observe firsthand the devastating living conditions of the British industrial working class, a testimony he set down in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), one of the first and most detailed empirical studies of the urban misery generated by early industrial capitalism. In Manchester, Engels met Karl Marx, with whom he established an intellectual collaboration and personal friendship that lasted until Marx's death in 1883, and together they wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848), the most influential programmatic document of the modern socialist movement, proclaiming class struggle as the engine of history and calling on workers of all countries to unite. Engels generously financed Marx for decades with the profits of his textile business, enabling him to devote himself to the economic research that would culminate in Capital, and after Marx's death he took on the enormous task of editing and publishing, from his unfinished manuscripts, the second and third volumes of that magnum opus. Beyond his role as collaborator and patron, Engels developed a significant philosophical output of his own, notably Anti-Dühring (1878), a systematic and didactic defence of Marxist dialectical materialism against the criticisms of the philosopher Eugen Dühring that exerted a decisive influence in popularising Marxism as a complete philosophical system, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), a pioneering anthropological analysis linking the emergence of private property and the state to the historical subordination of women, laying the groundwork for a later tradition of Marxist feminism. Engels's figure has been the subject of recurring historiographical debate over the extent to which his later systematisations of Marx's thought —especially regarding dialectical materialism applied to nature— faithfully reflect or oversimplify Marx's own original positions.

8 works

• Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx 1844 bis 1883, Erster B
• Feuerbach The roots of the socialist philosophy
• Landmarks of Scientific Socialism Anti-Duehring
• Manifesto of the Communist Party
• Revolution and Counter-Revolution; Or, Germany in 1848
• Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
• The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
• The origin of the family, private property, and the state