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Life
The son of a textile factory owner, he spent his inheritance funding Marx's writing and co-wrote the pamphlet that gave the workers of the world something to lose their chains for.
He tried to say everything at once (that history is reason unfolding, that mind and world are one) and nearly managed it.
Connection
G.W.F. Hegel dialectics turned materialist Friedrich Engels — Engels, like Marx, absorbed Hegel's dialectical method of understanding history as a process of conflict and resolution, then inverted its idealist premise to argue that material and economic conditions, not the unfolding of Spirit, drive historical change.
Ideas
Words
“The state is not abolished, it withers away.”
“An industrial revolution has taken place in England, a revolution which... is transforming the whole civil society.”
“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
“What experience and history teach is this — that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted on lessons they might have drawn from it.”
Key Moments
1845
Publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England
1885-1894
Edits and publishes Capital, volumes two and three
October 1806
Phenomenology finished as Napoleon enters Jena
1818
Professor and rector in Berlin
14 November 1831
Death by cholera
Works
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Phenomenology of Spirit
Philosophy of Right