Marx's co-author and patron; author of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
"The State is not 'abolished'. It dies out." — Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
Born to a Barmen mill-owning family, he managed the family firm in Manchester and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). After the 1848 revolution and the Baden rising he returned to the office for twenty years to keep the Marx household in London. From Anti-Dühring (1878) he drew three chapters into the pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), which was translated into ten languages and became the introduction to Marxism. After Marx's death he edited Capital vols. II and III, and in 1891 he published the Critique of the Gotha Programme (buried for fifteen years) over the objections of the party leadership.
Career Timeline
- 1842–1844Clerked at Ermen and Engels in Manchester — the field for The Condition of the Working Class in England
- 1844Met Marx in Paris, beginning a lifelong collaboration
- 1848Co-wrote the Communist Manifesto; on the staff of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung
- 1849Fought in the Baden-Palatinate campaign as an adjutant
- 1850–1870Returned to the Manchester firm and supported the Marx family for twenty years
- 1878Published Anti-Dühring, whose footnote calls Bismarckian nationalisation 'a kind of spurious Socialism'
- 1880At Lafargue's request drew out three chapters as Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique
- 1883–1894Edited Capital vols. II and III from Marx's manuscripts
- 1891Published the Critique of the Gotha Programme in Die Neue Zeit, answering the party's objections in his foreword
- 1895Died in London
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
After Marx's death in 1883, Engels was sorting through his papers when he found Marx's detailed notes on the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877). Marx had intended to develop Morgan's findings into a materialist account of prehistory; Engels regarded writing the book as "in a sense the fulfilment of a bequest." He completed the manuscript in barely two months (from late March to 26 May 1884). Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law made German publication impossible, so the first edition appeared in Zürich.
Building on Morgan's three-stage framework (savagery, barbarism, civilisation), Engels traced the evolution of family forms (consanguine→punaluan→pairing→monogamous) and linked each transition to the emergence of private property and class division. He called the shift from mother-right to father-right "the world-historic defeat of the female sex" and argued that monogamy arose not from sex-love but from the need to transmit property to heirs of indisputable paternity. The state, Engels argued, arose as an instrument of the ruling class to contain class antagonisms; the thesis that the state would "wither away" (Wegfall) when classes disappeared found its sharpest formulation in this book.
The fourth edition of 1891 incorporated the latest ethnographic research and added Engels's assessment of Bachofen and McLennan. The book became the classic starting point for Marxist theories of women's liberation and primitive communism, leaving a lasting debate in both socialist feminism and anthropology.