Whilst at Bremen, Engels began reading the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose teachings dominated German philosophy at that time. It would be some years before he joined the family firm. Their son's revolutionary activities disappointed them. His parents expected that he would follow his father into a career in the family business. After a year in Barmen, the young Engels was, in 1838, sent by his father to undertake an apprenticeship at a trading house in Bremen. Friedrich's parents were devout Pietist Protestants and they raised their children accordingly.Īt the age of 13, Engels attended secondary school ( Gymnasium) in the adjacent city of Elberfeld but had to leave at 17, due to pressure from his father, who wanted him to become a businessman and start work as a mercantile apprentice in the family firm. The wealthy Engels family owned large cotton-textile mills in Barmen and Salford, England, both expanding industrial metropoles. His philosophical writings on materialism, idealism, and dialectics supplied Marxism with an ontological and metaphysical foundation.īiography Early life The Engels family house at Barmen (now in Wuppertal), Germanyįriedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, Jülich-Cleves-Berg, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany), as eldest son of Friedrich Engels Sr. After Marx's death in 1883, Engels compiled Volumes II and III of Das Kapital (18), helped found the Second International, and was the leading authority on Marxism.Įngels also wrote wide-ranging works of his own, including The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Anti-Dühring (1878), Dialectics of Nature (1878–1882), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886). Engels also helped Marx financially, allowing him to continue his writing after moving to London in 1849. He met Marx in 1844, and they jointly authored a number of works, including The Holy Family (1844), The German Ideology (written 1846), and The Communist Manifesto (1848), and worked as political organizers and activists in the Communist League and First International. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator.Įngels's family was wealthy and owned large cotton-textile mills in Prussia and England.

Alienation and exploitation of the worker, dialectical materialism, historical materialism, false consciousnessįriedrich Engels ( / ˈ ɛ ŋ ɡ əl z/ ENG-gəlz German: 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.

Death trash philosopher