Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen, Prussia, into a family of textile manufacturers and spent much of his working life managing the family firm's mill in Manchester, England. His observations there produced The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). He met Karl Marx in 1844, co-wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) and financially supported Marx for decades. After Marx's death he edited volumes two and three of Capital and became the leading interpreter of Marxist theory for the growing socialist parties of Europe. He also advised the Second International, founded in 1889, and in his final years endorsed the electoral successes of German social democrats while maintaining that revolution remained possible. He died in London in 1895.

Engels shaped how Marxism was taught to millions. His popular works were central texts for German social democrats and later for Soviet Marxism-Leninism, and his writing on the family influenced socialist feminism and anthropology. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes, many interpreters, beginning with Georg Lukács, have argued that his work offers a more deterministic and mechanistic account of history than Marx's, while other scholars reject this sharp contrast. Liberal and conservative critics hold him jointly responsible with Marx for the doctrines of communist regimes, while others credit his Manchester study as an early work of empirical social research. Historians also note the tension between his own life as a mill owner and his anticapitalist writing, which he used to fund Marx's work. Today he is read in debates on urban poverty, industrial working conditions and the history of the family.