Friedrich Engels

1820-1895 · German · Political Philosophy, Social Theory, Philosophy of History, Philosophical Anthropology

The state is not abolished. It withers away.

The son of a Rhineland textile manufacturer, Friedrich Engels spent nearly three decades running his father's Manchester mill — and walking the slums of Salford and Little Ireland, talking with workers, reading factory inspectors' reports. That double life produced "The Condition of the Working Class in England" (1845), a founding document of social investigation written at twenty-four, and what Terrell Carver called "the eloquence of facts."

Topics Friedrich Engels addresses

• historical materialism
• dialectical materialism
• the materialist conception of history
• scientific socialism
• base and superstructure
• the dialectics of nature
• the three laws of dialectics
• the negation of the negation
• determination in the last instance
• the withering away of the state
• utopian socialism
• the eloquence of facts
• primitive communism
• the origin of the family
• the patriarchal monogamous family
• the gens
• the production and reproduction of immediate life
• the part played by labour in the transition from ape to man
• the condition of the working class in England
• the housing question
• the peasant war in Germany
• the force theory
• world schematism
• basic forms of motion

Converse with Friedrich Engels on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Friedrich Engels's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.