page_title: Friedrich Engels
section_title: Personality
hierarchical_section_title: Friedrich Engels / Personality
caption_attribution_description: Engels in 1868
context_page_description: Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, historian, communist, political scientist, journalist, political activist and businessman. His father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford, England, and Barmen, Prussia.
  Engels developed what is now known as Marxist theory together with Karl Marx and in 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research in English cities. In 1848, Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Marx and also authored and co-authored many other works. Later, Engels supported Marx financially, allowing him to do research and write Das Kapital. After Marx's death, Engels edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. Additionally, Engels organised Marx's notes on the Theories of Surplus Value, which were later published as the "fourth volume" of Das Kapital. In 1884, he published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State on the basis of Marx's ethnographic research.
  Engels died in London on 5 August 1895, at the age of 74 of laryngeal cancer and following cremation his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head, near Eastbourne.
context_section_description: Engels's interests included poetry, fox hunting, and hosting regular Sunday parties for London's left-wing intelligentsia where, as one regular put it, "no one left before two or three in the morning". His stated personal motto was "take it easy", while "jollity" was listed as his favourite virtue.
  Of Engels’ personality and appearance, Robert Heilbroner in The Worldly Philosophers described him as "tall and fair and rather elegant, he had the figure of a man who liked to fence and to ride to hounds and who had once swum the Weser River four times without a break." as well as having been "gifted with a quick wit and facile mind" and of a gay temperament, As well as being able to "stutter in twenty languages". He had a great enjoyment of wine and other "bourgeois pleasures". Engels favored forming romantic relationships with that of the proletariat, and found a long term partner in a working class woman named Mary Burns, they never married, and after her death, Engels was romantically involved with her younger sister Lydia Burns.
  Former Labour MP Tristram Hunt, author of The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, sums up the disconnect between Engels's personality, and the Soviet Union which later utilised his works, stating:
  This great lover of the good life, passionate advocate of individuality, and enthusiastic believer in literature, culture, art and music as an open forum could never have acceded to the Soviet Communism of the 20th century, all the Stalinist claims of his paternity notwithstanding.
  As to the religious persuasion attributable to Engels, Hunt writes:
  In that sense the latent rationality of Christianity comes to permeate the everyday experience of the modern world—its values are now variously incarnated in the family, civil society, and the state. What Engels particularly embraced in all of this was an idea of modern pantheism (or, rather, pandeism, a merging of divinity with progressing humanity, a happy dialectical synthesis that freed him from the fixed oppositions of the pietist ethos of devout longing and estrangement. "Through Strauss I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism... The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the 'modern pantheists,'" Engels wrote in one of his final letters to the soon-to-be-discarded Graebers [Wilhelm and Friedrich, priest trainees and former classmates of Engels].
  Engels was a polyglot and was able to write and speak in several languages, including Russian, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, Spanish, Polish, French, English and Milanese dialect.
caption: Engels in 1868[97]
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