FRIEDRICH ENGELS Also by Terrell Carver A MARX DICTIONARY ENGELS KARL MARX: Texts on Method MARX AND ENGELS: The Intellectual Relationship MARX'S SOCIAL THEORY Friedrich Engels His Life and Thought Terrell Carver Lecturer in Politics University ofBristol Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0-333-56530-8 ISBN 978-1-349-20403-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20403-8 © Terrell Foster Carver 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-36017-0 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, SL Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Fu:st published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-04501-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carver, Terrell. Friedrich Engels: his life and thought/ferrell Carver. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-312-04501-2 I. Engels, Friedrich, 1820-1895. 2. Dialectical materialism. I. Title. B3224.E6C37 1990 335.4'092--dc20 [B] 89-77153 CIP For my friends in America Contents List of Plates ix List of Abbreviations xi Map: Germany about 1848 xiv Introduction: Which Engels? XV 1 Intellectual Awakening 1 I Early Years 1 II Away from Home 12 III Radicalism 19 IV Scepticism 24 v Rationalism 28 2 Beginning of a Career 31 I Factory Towns 32 II 'Oswald' 39 III Young Hegelians 43 IV Liberalism and Nationalism 47 v Theory and Practice 53 3 Autodidact in Philosophy 60 I Correspondent in Berlin 62 II Pamphleteer 69 III Bombardier 80 IV Rhenish Radicals 81 v 'The Free' 86 vii viii Contents 4 Manchester Man 95 I Meeting Marx 96 II Class Consciousness 101 III Economic Theory 110 IV Anglo-German 119 v 'The Eloquence of Facts' 124 5 Personal and Political 133 I Son and Brother 134 II Engels in Love 145 III Widower and Testator 161 6 Continental Communist 172 I Class Politics 175 II Rhineland Revolutionary 191 7 Emigration 209 I An Independent Writer 211 II Materialism and Science 232 Conclusion: Politician and Theorist 253 Guide to Further Reading 261 Index 265 List of Plates 1 (right) Friedrich Engels at 19 2 (below, left) Friedrich Engels, senior, father of the above young man 3 (below, right) Elizabeth Engels, mother of Friedrich Engels 4 The Engels house, Barmen, where Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 5 View of Lower Barmen, 1832 6 Friedrich Engels, 1845 7 Engels's 1842 caricature of 'The Free', the Berlin group of Young Hegelians, identified by him as Ruge, Buhl, Nauwerck, Bruno Bauer, Wigand, Edgar Bauer, Stirner, Meyen, stranger, Koppen 8 Engels's caricature of himself, December 1840, 'I was furious because the cigar would not draw.' 9 Engel's caricature of himself, August 1840, 'My hammock, containing myself smoking a cigar.' 10 Cartoons by Engels, June 1839 (left to right): world-weariness; modern stress and strain; (above) discord of Cologne; (below) emancipation of women; spirit of the times; emancipation of the flesh 11 Friedrich Engels, 1865 12 The Chetham Library, Manchester, 1870 13 (left) Friedrich Engels in mid-life 14 Helene Demuth, servant to the Marx family and later house­ keeper to Friedrich Engels 15 Lydia 'Lizzy' Burns, briefly Mrs Friedrich Engels 16 Louise Kautsky-Freyberger, last housekeeper to Friedrich En- gels 17 Friedrich Engels, 1880 18 Friedrich Engels, 1890 19 Friedrich Engels, c. 1895 (the year of his death) ix List of Abbreviations Note: Volume numbers appear in arabic before abbreviations, and page numbers after, e.g. Collected Works, vol. 25, p. 37, appears as 25CW37. In textual matters I have cited Collected Works for preference, and chosen other editions only where absolutely necessary. AM Terence Ball and James Farr (eds) After Marx (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). COND F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. and ed. W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chalenor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). CW Marx and Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-- (series incomplete)). D Friedrich Engels: Dokumente seines Lebens, ed. Manfred Kliem (Frankfurt a.M.: Roderberg-Verlag, 1977). DKM The Daughters of Karl Marx, Family Correspondence 1866-1898, trans. Faith Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984). EF Terrell Carver, 'Engels's Feminism', History of Political Thought, vol. 6, no. 3 (1985) pp. 479-89. FE Heinrich Gemkow et al., Friedrich Engels: A Biography (Dresden: Verlag Zeit im Bild, 1972). H W.O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels, 2 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1976). IR David McLellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollec­ tions (London: Macmillan, 1981). K Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, 2 vols (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972 and 1976). KM David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1973). L George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1964). M Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974). MBM David McLellan, Marx Before Marxism, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1980). MEGA1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe, ed. D. xi xii List of Abbreviations Ryazanov et al. (Frankfurt and Berlin: Marx-Engels­ Archiv Verlagsgesellschaft, 1927- (series incomplete)). MEGA2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972- (series in progress)). MEIR Terrell Carver, Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983). MEOUT Terrell Carver, 'Marx - and Engels's "Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy"', History of Political Thought, vol. 4, no. 2 (1983) pp. 357-65. MEW Marx and Engels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956-68 (series complete)). MP Alan Gilbert, Marx's Politics (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981). MST Terrell Carver, Marx's Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1982). R Fritz J. Raddatz, Karl Marx, trans. Richard Barry (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978). SW Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (in two volumes) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962). SWOV Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (in one volume) (New York: International Publishers, 1968, repr. 1984). YHKM David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (Lon­ don: Macmillan, 1969). Acknowledgement The author and publishers are grateful to Lawrence & Wishart Ltd for permission to reproduce quotations from Marx and Engels, Collected Works. I GERMANY ABOUT 18481 IOO 150 Mil .. Kilomttr• 0 Germany about 1848 Source: Davl"d Mclellan, Karl Marx.. His Ltfe. an d Thought (Lond on· . Macmillan, 1973), p. XIV. Introduction: Which Engels? In this biography of Friedrich Engels (1820-95) the reader will not find a compendium of every known fact about him. Those who already know something about Engels will doubtless find some favourite incident or anecdote missing from my account. But I hope that my choice of questions to put to the historical record, and my attempts to find answers, will stimulate interest in Engels the man, his career and the issues that concerned him. The guiding questions for the work as a whole are as follows: What is the intellectual and political legacy of Friedrich Engels? What does an investigation of his life disclose to us about his works, his character, his associates and his times? How does this knowledge affect our view of Karl Marx (1818-83}, the history and current state of Marxism, and contemporary politics? The guiding questions for each chapter are made explicit as this work progresses. In some cases the reader will note that I offer several possible answers to the questions I have posed, because I have found the record inconclusive. It seems to me honest and informative to explore anumber of explanations rather than merely to opt for one at random, or worse, to back up a pre-existing view. I have considered Engels's relationship with Marx in works listed in the Guide to Further Reading in the present volume, and I have come to conclusions about their relationship which the interested reader can examine. In this biography the focus is on Engels himself, not Engels the junior partner to Marx, the sup­ posed role on which most attention has been focused. Engels put immense emphasis on that view of their relationship, particularly in retrospect, since he outlived Marx by some twelve years. The reader will find that I treat those autobiographical comments with the same scepticism that applies elsewhere in examining sources. I have set the agenda for the present volume as I think best for exploring and understanding Engels's life and thought as they can be reconstructed from surviving materials. I have not allowed the XV xvi Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought interpretive tradition established by Engels himself and by various memoirists to dictate the agenda. Also, I have not been swayed by the sheer quantity of materials in constructing my own scheme and narrative, but have instead focused selectively on what was formative for Engels and what has remained influential in politics. I hope that readers will not prejudge my agenda as wrong simply because it is not traditional. In fact I hope that they will see my work in a favourable light precisely for that reason. Engels is much taken for granted, and very little studied. Even when his writings are scrutinized, the object is very often the curious one of attempting to show that Marx agreed with certain portions of them. The use Engels himself made of Marx's insights is seldom examined, because Engels's thought is almost never taken as an object of study in its own right. His life is similarly subordinated to those points at which he becomes important to the various views intellectual historians have taken about Marx. The present work is entitled Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought, and the subtitle means what it says. Chapters 1-4 of this biography present a detailed analysis of Engels's early development up to his twenty-fifth year.