Friedrich Engels Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820, in Barmen, in the Prussian Rhineland (today part of Wuppertal). He grew up in a prosperous, devoutly Protestant family active in the textile trade. Intended for business rather than academia, he left school before completing his Abitur to enter commerce. Yet he gravitated toward literature and philosophy, and as a young man in Bremen and later Berlin he absorbed the debates of the Young Hegelians. Encounters with writers such as Bruno Bauer and the materialist turn inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach sharpened his critical approach to religion, politics, and society. He fulfilled a one-year military service in Berlin while attending lectures unofficially, began journalism, and wrote polemical pieces that displayed a rigorous, historically grounded style that would mark his later work.

Manchester and the Discovery of Industrial Capitalism
In 1842 Engels was sent by his family to Manchester to work at Ermen & Engels, a cotton-thread firm linked to the Engels household. The rapidly industrializing city confronted him with stark inequalities and the daily realities of working-class life. He moved among Chartists and labor activists, and his intimate partnership with Mary Burns, an Irish working-class woman, gave him access to neighborhoods and experiences often hidden from middle-class observers. Out of this immersion emerged The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), a pioneering empirical study that linked poverty, disease, and overcrowding to the dynamics of capitalist production and the factory system. On a visit to Paris in 1844 he met Karl Marx; their discussions forged a lifelong intellectual partnership premised on a shared materialist conception of history.

Intellectual Partnership with Karl Marx
From 1844 onward Engels collaborated closely with Marx, whom he supported both intellectually and, later, financially. Together they critiqued the Young Hegelians in The Holy Family (1845) and drafted The German Ideology (1846), developing the theory that historical change flows from material production, class relations, and struggle rather than pure ideas. In Brussels they helped build networks of revolutionary exiles, working with figures such as Moses Hess and Georg Weerth. Engels sketched Principles of Communism as a preparatory text; in early 1848 he and Marx produced the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a concise statement of communist aims that situated modern class struggle in the rise of the bourgeoisie. Jenny Marx (Jenny von Westphalen) was crucial to this partnership, sustaining the households and political work amid hardship.

Revolution, Journalism, and Exile
The upheavals of 1848 drew Engels and Marx to Cologne, where they helped edit the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. After counterrevolution gained the upper hand, Engels joined the armed resistance in the Baden-Palatinate campaign of 1849, serving under August Willich during the retreat. Following defeat he fled through Switzerland to England, beginning a long exile that would anchor his role as strategist, polemicist, and organizer for the international workers movement.

Manchester Years and Scholarship
From 1850 to 1869 Engels lived primarily in Manchester, resuming work at Ermen & Engels in order to provide steady financial support to Marx, who was then in London. Their correspondence from these years forms a vast laboratory of theory: economics, history, military science, and tactics for the workers movement. Engels wrote The Peasant War in Germany (1850) to illuminate how class forces shaped an earlier epoch of revolt, and the series Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany (1851, 1852), often published under Marx's name, analyzed the dynamics of the 1848 events. He became widely read on military affairs, earning the affectionate nickname "the General" among friends. Mary Burns remained his companion until her death in 1863; later he shared his life with her sister Lydia (Lizzie) Burns, whom he married shortly before her death in 1878.

International Organizing and Theoretical Synthesis
The founding of the International Workingmen's Association (First International) in 1864, with Marx at its center, broadened Engels's role. He wrote on housing, urban planning, and exploitation in The Housing Question (1872, 1873), engaged polemically with anarchist currents associated with Mikhail Bakunin, and advised labor leaders including August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht in the growing German Social Democratic movement. After retiring from business in 1869 he moved to London, deepening collaboration with Marx and the Marx family, including Eleanor Marx. In Anti-Duhring (1878), a comprehensive rebuttal to Eugen Duhring, Engels synthesized political economy, philosophy, and natural science to outline a coherent socialist worldview; the widely read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) distilled its central theses. During the 1870s he also drafted notes later published as Dialectics of Nature, exploring how materialist dialectics might relate to the sciences, though he left the manuscript unfinished.

Editing Capital and Mentoring a Movement
Marx's death in 1883 placed Engels at the helm of a vast editorial task. Working from difficult drafts and notebooks, he prepared Capital, Volume II (1885) and Volume III (1894) for publication, a feat of scholarship that required keen judgment and fidelity to Marx's arguments. He coordinated translations and editions in several languages, collaborating with Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and assisted Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Laura Marx, Paul Lafargue, and Eleanor Marx in building an international socialist literature. Engels corresponded tirelessly with leaders across Europe and beyond, advising on strategy, trade union work, and parliamentary tactics. He backed the orientation that later informed the Erfurt Program of German Social Democracy, arguing for the combination of firm principles with practical, mass-based organization.

Personal Character and Working Methods
Engels combined erudition with direct engagement in the life of the working class. Fluent in multiple languages and widely read, he also prized empirical observation, statistics, and comparative history. Friends remembered his hospitality, quick wit, and meticulous editorial standards. He insisted that theory serve practice, and he took special interest in military history and geography, believing that political strategy required a sober assessment of forces and terrain. While sometimes caricatured as the "systematizer" next to Marx's originality, he was a creative thinker in his own right whose works on family, anthropology, and science provoked enduring debate.

Final Years and Legacy
In the 1890s Engels remained a central reference point for a new generation of socialist leaders and intellectuals, including Bebel, Liebknecht, Kautsky, and Bernstein. He participated in the debates of the Second International, helped settle disputes in various parties, and defended the core of historical materialism against both anarchist and reformist misreadings. His own major late work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drew on the ethnography of Lewis Henry Morgan to argue that social institutions evolved with changing modes of production and inheritance, sparking discussions that would continue long after his death.

Engels died in London on August 5, 1895. He was cremated at Woking, and, according to his wishes, his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head near Eastbourne. By then he had helped transform a set of scattered critiques into a coherent, international socialist tradition. Through decades of partnership with Karl Marx and collaboration with figures such as Jenny Marx, Eleanor Marx, Laura and Paul Lafargue, August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky, he shaped the intellectual and organizational tools that would guide labor movements around the world. His writings, correspondence, and editorial labors ensured that the theoretical edifice of Capital and the broader project of historical materialism would outlive their authors and continue to inform debates on class, democracy, and social change.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Friedrich, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Justice - Freedom - Equality - Reason & Logic.

Other people realated to Friedrich: Max Stirner (Philosopher), Ferdinand Lassalle (Politician), Florence Kelley (Activist)

• 1886 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Book)
• 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Book)
• 1883 Dialectics of Nature (Book)
• 1877 Anti-Dühring (Book)
• 1850 The Peasant War in Germany (Book)
• 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Book)

• Wikipedia