Friedrich Engels: biography of this revolutionary philosopher

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was the German philosopher and politician who founded modern communism together with Karl Marx. Some authors who consider that the key to understanding the thought of Friedrich Engels is precisely his biography, because it was his youthful development that marked much of his work.

Then we will do a brief review of the biography of Friedrich Engels, and we point out some of his works and his main contributions to the philosophical, political and economic thought of the 20th century.

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Friedrich Engels, biography of a revolutionary

Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820. He was the eldest of eight siblings and belonged to a family that owned mills in Barmen, north of Prussia which is currently part of Germany, and which had an important industrial development in that moment.

Son of textile manufacturer, Engels he soon became concerned about the general conditions of the manufacturing industries and the situation of the working class

. During his adulthood he worked in this sector, which inspired him to start writing some of his main works.

Although he had been raised in a Protestant family, Engels was closer to atheistic beliefs. The latter caused some conflicts with his parents and especially with his mother.

The same thing happened when he had to drop out of school and his father sent him to work as a clerk in a commercial house. Both his mother and his father expected him to develop an entrepreneurial career, just as they had. However Engels was already developing some activities that were considered revolutionary and inciting collective organization, which disappointed his parents again.

In 1844 he met Karl Marx, in Paris, just before settling in England after some failures of the revolutions of the same decade. In fact, during his stay in England, Engels he worked for the textile industry where his father was a shareholder. The latter considered that perhaps if Engels worked in this industry, this would serve to appease the radical teachings he had received at school.

Engels he continued to work together with Marx many years later, even helped him finance the first volume of his main work, Capital (Das Kapital), in 1867 and provided him with a livelihood, since Marx He had serious difficulties to live independently because of the beto imposed on him by large families with power over the economy and the economy. politics.

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Most important work and intellectual contributions

There are many debate about Engels's relationship with Hegelian philosophy from before 1850, as well as his relationship with his working-class capitalist family. He even signed some of his works under the pseudonym Friedrich Oswald, to avoid connecting his Protestant and business family with the provocativeness of his writings.

Among other things, Friedrich Engels contributed very important discussions on some notions about nationality, military and scientific affairs, industrial operations. And maybe two of his great contributions to the Western philosophical tradition are historical materialism and dialectical materialism.

Also Engels was positioned against the institution of marriage because he considered it as something unnatural and unfair. He maintained this conviction despite his long relationship with Mary Burns, who also helped him to enter the working class of England.

Several of the observations and notes he made on the British working class provided key insights into the dire working conditions they were experiencing. From there he also became involved with politicians and journalists with whom he shared radical thoughts for the time.

It was not until 1845, when he began to formulate together with Marx a materialist interpretation of history, in which he proposed the eventual consolidation of a communist society. They spread the same thing through different groups, mainly the working class, within Germany, France and England.

Eventually the London Communist Congress adopted several of his ideas, and authorized him to begin outlining the principles of communism. This was how the first part of the Communist Manifesto (The Manifest der kommunistischen Partei) was published on February 21, 1848. This text is primarily written by Marx, but includes many of Engels's definitions of communism.

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Other key texts and important books by Engels

The first work published by Engels was not an academic text, but was a poem entitled The bedouin, which was included in the 1838 edition of Bremisches Conversationblastt.

His most popular work began in the 1840s, with The Holy Family (1844), which was a critique of the "young Hegelians", which was a very popular academic circle evidently influenced by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Hegel. Later he published The situation of the working class in England (1845), which contains several of the beginnings of socialism and its development, which is why it is considered one of the classic texts.

Later he published the work From utopian socialism to scientific socialism (1880), where he makes a critique of socialist utopias and offers an explanation of capitalism from the development and social and economic progression understood by historical materialism.

Finally, he publishes The origin of the family, private property and the state (1884), where he context capitalism with the institution of the family. This work was developed at the peak stage in Engels' intellectual development, and contains a powerful historical insight into the family in relation to class, gender and private property.

Bibliographic references:

• Craver, T. (1990). Friedrich Engels: his life and thought. Macmillan: USA.
• New World Encyclopedia. (2017). Friedrich Engels. Retrieved May 17, 2018. Available in http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Friedrich_Engels.