Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895

Friedrich Engels was a 19th-century German philosopher, social scientist, and revolutionary, the closest collaborator of Karl Marx and a co-founder of the tradition of thought that bears Marx's name. With Marx he co-authored the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and The German Ideology, and after Marx's death he prepared the second and third volumes of Capital for publication. His own works, including The Condition of the Working Class in England, Anti-Duhring, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, applied the materialist conception of history to industrial capitalism, philosophy, and the family. He spent much of his adult life in Manchester managing the family textile business that supported Marx and his family financially. His expositions did much to shape Marxism into a systematic worldview after Marx's death.

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) was a German political philosopher, economic theorist, and lifelong intellectual collaborator of Karl Marx. Born to a wealthy textile manufacturer in Barmen, he was sent at twenty-two to oversee the family's interests in the Manchester cotton mills, where his observations of English industrial conditions produced The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) — one of the founding documents of modern political economy and social investigation.

Engels met Marx in 1844 and the two began a forty-year collaboration that produced The Holy Family (1844), The German Ideology (1845–46), and the Communist Manifesto (1848), and that sustained Marx through the long years of work on Capital. Engels's own major philosophical works — Anti-Dühring (1878), Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), and the posthumously published Dialectics of Nature — systematized what came to be called dialectical materialism and gave the Marxist tradition its philosophical self-understanding.

Engels's financial support enabled Marx to complete Capital, Volume I, and after Marx's death Engels assembled and published Volumes II and III from Marx's manuscripts. His work as a public intellectual and as an organizer of the Second International shaped the institutional development of late nineteenth-century European socialism. He died in London in 1895, having outlived Marx by twelve years and seen the movement they founded become one of the major political forces of the modern world.