Friedrich Engels ( ENG-(g)əlz; German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈɛŋl̩s]; 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best known for his lifelong collaboration with Karl Marx, with whom he co-authored The Communist Manifesto (1848) and developed the political and philosophical system that came to be known as Marxism. After Marx's death, Engels served as the editor of his works, completing the second and third volumes of Das Kapital.
Born in Barmen, Prussia, to a prosperous mercantile family, Engels rejected his family's devoutly Pietist values from a young age. He became involved with the Young Hegelians while performing military service in Berlin and embraced a materialist philosophy. In 1842, his father sent him to Manchester, England, to work in a cotton mill in which the family had an investment. His experiences of the industrial working class there led him to write his first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
In 1844, Engels began a permanent partnership with Marx in Paris. Together they worked to critique the prevailing idealist philosophies and develop their materialist conception of history, notably in The Holy Family and The German Ideology. They became active in the Communist League, which commissioned them to write the Manifesto. Engels participated actively in the Revolutions of 1848, including in armed combat, before being forced into exile in England. From 1850, he lived in Manchester and worked for the family firm of Ermen & Engels for two decades, leading a double life as a respectable cotton merchant while providing crucial financial support to the impoverished Marx family in London.
After retiring in 1870, Engels moved to London and took on a central role in the International Workingmen's Association (First International). Following Marx's death in 1883, he devoted the rest of his life to editing his writings and acting as the leading authority on their shared philosophy. Engels's own works, particularly Anti-Dühring (1878) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), were instrumental in popularizing Marxism and became foundational texts for the Second International. His application of dialectics to science in works like Dialectics of Nature was later controversially developed into the state ideology of the Soviet Union. Engels died of cancer in London in 1895, and his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head.
Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, in the Province of Jülich-Cleves-Berg of Prussia (later in Rhine Province; now part of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany). He was the eldest of nine children born to Friedrich Engels Sr., a prosperous cotton mill owner, and Elise Franziska Mauritia von Haar, the daughter of a schoolmaster. The Engels family were devout Protestants and belonged to the Pietist movement, an influential form of German Lutheranism that stressed personal devotion and practical faith. This background instilled in Engels a deep religiosity in his youth, marked by his 1837 Confirmation poem, but also exposed him to a Calvinist work ethic that fused worldly success with signs of divine grace.
Engels grew up in the Wupper valley, an early industrial centre known as the "German Manchester". His childhood home was part of a family compound surrounded by factories, workers' tenements, and the family's commercial enterprises. His great-grandfather had founded a firm for bleaching yarn, which had expanded to include a spinning mill and a lace-knitting factory. From his earliest days, he was exposed to the harsh realities of industrialisation: polluted rivers, dangerous working conditions, and the stark contrast between the "spacious and sumptuous houses" of the merchant elite and the poverty of the working class. The family business, Ermen & Engels, which his father co-founded with Dutch partners Godfrey and Peter Ermen in 1837, would later expand to include a major thread factory in Manchester.
Despite the family's strict Pietist and commercial ethos, which valued industriousness and viewed pleasure as a "heathen blasphemy", Engels's home life was not without warmth. His father was a keen musician who played the cello, and the family enjoyed chamber concerts of piano, cello, and bassoon. His mother, Elise, was more humorous and well-read than her husband; he inherited her "cheerful disposition" and love of reading, and she fostered his intellectual curiosity, introducing him to German literature and giving him the complete works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a Christmas present. His maternal grandfather, Bernhard van Haar, a pastor and school headmaster, introduced him to classical mythology, while his mother also told him stories of Greek heroes. Concerned about his son's rebellious spirit, his father once discovered a "dirty book from a lending library, a romance of the thirteenth century" that the young Engels had been reading in secret.
Education and early radicalism
From an early age, Engels chafed against the strictures of Barmen life. At fourteen, he was sent to the municipal Gymnasium (secondary school) in nearby Elberfeld, which was purportedly one of the finest in Prussia. There, under the tutelage of his history and literature teacher, Dr. Johann Clausen, he developed a growing interest in the myths and romance of ancient Germania and the liberal nationalism of the Young Germany movement. This romantic patriotism was an early intellectual influence, shaping his imagination with heroic legends like Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero of the Nibelungenlied. His early writings reveal a political romanticism that fused Byronic heroism with the recent struggle for Greek independence, as seen in his unfinished 1837 story, "A Pirate Tale", which showed a fascination with the "hardware of war".
His father, concerned about his son's literary and philosophical leanings, withdrew him from the Gymnasium in September 1837, just nine months before his graduation and just before his seventeenth birthday. The decision reflected both his father's authoritarianism and Engels's own desire to pursue literature as his "inner and real" career alongside his "outward profession" in business. He was expected to join the family business, dashing his hopes of studying law at university. He spent a year being inducted into the family firm in Barmen, during which he read rationalist works such as David Strauss's The Life of Jesus (1835). His youthful poetry turned into imitations of the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was then employed as a clerk in a local business. In July 1838 he was sent to Bremen for a commercial apprenticeship at the trading house of Heinrich Leupold, a linen exporter.
The coastal air of Bremen, a free Hanseatic trading city, proved more congenial to Engels than the "low Barmen mists". While working as a clerk handling international correspondence, he took full advantage of the city's more liberal social life. He took dancing lessons, went horse-riding, swam in the Weser, and joined the Academy of Singing. A suavely attractive and vain young man, he sported a moustache as a political statement and engaged in the student practice of fencing, boasting of duels fought to defend his honour.
It was in Bremen that Engels began to write publicly. Using the pseudonym "Friedrich Oswald" to hide his identity from his family, he contributed cultural criticism and feuilletons to Karl Gutzkow's paper, Telegraph für Deutschland. His most significant work of this period was Letters from Wuppertal (1839), a searing eyewitness account of the social conditions in his home region. A "sensational attack on hypocrisy in the valley towns", it offered a brutal critique of the human costs of industrialisation—the exploitation of child labour, the rampant alcoholism, the "smoky factory buildings" and the red-dyed Wupper river—and linked this misery directly to the religious hypocrisy of the Pietist factory owners. The publication of the Letters caused a severe conflict with his parents and established the basis for his later separation from them.