Friedrich Engels

Engels was the eldest son of a pious textile manufacturer in Wuppertal. Taken out of school at seventeen to learn the trade, he began writing radical articles anonymously as a clerk in Bremen, joined the Young Hegelians during his military service in Berlin, and heard Schelling's lectures against Hegel, which he answered in print. In 1842 his father sent him to the family's part-owned mill in Manchester; on the way he met Marx for the first time in Cologne, and the meeting was cool.

Two years in Manchester changed him. He fell in love with the Irish millworker Mary Burns, who took him through the slums, and in 1845 published The Condition of the Working Class in England, the first study of industrial society based on direct observation. In Paris in 1844 he met Marx again; they talked for ten days, found themselves in complete agreement on every theoretical question, and worked together for forty years. He co-wrote The Holy Family, The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto and fought in the armed rising in Baden in 1849.

After the revolutions failed he went back to the Manchester mill for twenty years in a business he hated, to support Marx's exiled family in London: accounts by day, military science, languages and natural science by night, and a steady flow of money to Marx. In 1869 he sold his share, moved to London in 1870, and saw Marx daily. Anti-Dühring set out Marxist philosophy, economics and socialism as a system; three chapters were later issued separately as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the most widely read introduction to Marxism.

After Marx's death he spent twelve years editing volumes two and three of Capital and wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, using Morgan's anthropology to argue that monogamy and the state are products of private property and that women's emancipation requires their entry into public production. The Dialectics of Nature tried to show that dialectic governs nature too, an extension that became the basis of Soviet official philosophy and a lasting quarrel within Marxism. In old age he advised the Second International; by his wish his ashes were scattered in the sea off Eastbourne.