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prejudices, and who through Hegel's philosophy had arrived at most extreme
deductions in the realms of politics, civil and religious relations. In 1841 Marx
obtained his doctorate from the University of Jena.
At that time Engels too fell in with the set of the Young Hegelians. We do not
know but that it was precisely in these circles that Engels first met Marx.
Engels was born in Barmen, in the northern section of the Rhine province.
This was the centre of the cotton and wool industries, not far from the future
important metallurgical centre. Engels was of German extraction and belonged to a
well-to-do family.
In the books containing genealogies of the merchants and the manufacturers
of the Rhine province, the Engels family occupies a respectable place. Here one may
find the family coat of arms of the Engelses. These merchants, not unlike the nobility,
were sufficiently pedigreed to have their own coat of arms. Engels' ancestors bore on
their shield an angel carrying an olive branch, the emblem of peace, signalising as it
were, the pacific life and aspirations of one of the illustrious scions of their race. It is
with this coat of arms that Engels entered life. This shield was most likely chosen
because of the name, Engels, suggesting Angel in German. The prominence of this
family can be judged by the fact that its origin can be traced back to the sixteenth
century. As to Marx we can hardly ascertain who his grandfather was; all that is
known is that his was a family of rabbis.: But so little interest had been taken in this
family that records do not take us further back than two generations. Engels on the
contrary has even two variants of his genealogy. According to certain data, Engels
was a remote descendant of a Frenchman L'Ange, a Protestant, a Huguenot, who
found refuge in Germany. Engels' more immediate relatives deny this French origin,
insisting on his purely German antecedents. At any rate, in the seventeenth century
the Engels family was an old, firmly rooted family of cloth manufacturers, who later
became cotton manufacturers. It was a wealthy family with extensive international
dealings. The older Engels, together with his friend Erman, erected textile factories
not only in his native land but also in Manchester. He became an Anglo-German
textile manufacturer.
Engels' father belonged to the Protestant creed. An evangelist, he was
curiously reminiscent of the old Calvinists, in his profound religious faith, and no less
profound conviction, that the business of man on this earth is the acquisition and
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hoarding of wealth through industry and commerce. In life he was fanatically
religious. Every moment away from business or other mundane activities he
consecrated to pious reflections. On this ground the relations between the Engelses,
father and son, were quite different from those we have observed in the Marx family.
Very soon the ideas of father and son clashed; the father was resolved to make of his
son a merchant, and he accordingly brought him up in the business spirit. At the age
of seventeen the boy was sent to Bremen, one of the biggest commercial cities in
Germany. There he was forced to serve in a business office for three years. By his
letters to some school chums we learn how, having entered this atmosphere, Engels
tried to free himself of its effects. He went there a godly youth, but soon fell under the
sway of Heine and Borne. At the age of nineteen he became a writer and sallied forth
as an apostle of a freedom-loving, democratic Germany. His first articles, which
attracted attention and which appeared under the pseudonym of Oswald, mercilessly
scored the environment in which the author had spent his childhood. These letters
from Wupperthal created a strong impression. One could sense that they were
written by a man who was brought up in that locality and who had a good knowledge
of its people. While in Bremen he emancipated himself completely of all religious
prepossessions and developed into an old French Jacobin.
About 1841, at the age of twenty, Engels entered the Artillery Guards of Berlin
as a volunteer. There he fell in with the same circle of the Young Hegelians to which
Marx belonged. He became the adherent of the extreme left wing of the Hegelian
philosophy. While Marx, in 1842, was still engrossed in his studies and was
preparing himself for a University career, Engels, who had begun to write in 1839,
attained a conspicuous place in literature under his old pseudonym, and was taking a
most active part in the ideological struggles which were carried on by the disciples of
the old and the new philosophical systems.
In the years 1841 and 1842 there lived in Berlin a great number of Russians --
Bakunin, Ogarev, Frolov and others. They too were fascinated by the same
philosophy which fascinated Marx and Engels. To what extent this is true can be
shown by the following episode. In 1842 Engels wrote a trenchant criticism of the
philosophy of Hegel's adversary, Friedrich Schelling. The latter then received an
invitation from the Prussian government to come to Berlin and to pit his philosophy,
which endeavoured to reconcile the Bible with science, against the Hegelian system.
The views expressed by Engels at that period were so suggestive of the views of the
26
Russian critic Bielinsky of that period, and of the articles of Bakunin, that, up to very
recently, Engels' pamphlet in which he had attacked Schelling's Philosophy of
Revelation, was ascribed to Bakunin. Now we know that it was an error, that the
pamphlet was not written by Bakunin. The forms of expression of both writers, the
subjects they chose, the proofs they presented while attempting to establish the
perfections of the Hegelian philosophy, were so remarkably similar that it is little
wonder that many Russians considered and still consider Bakunin the author of this
booklet.
Thus at the age of twenty-two, Engels was an accomplished democratic writer,
with ultra-radical tendencies. In one of his humorous poems he depicted himself a
fiery Jacobin. In this respect he reminds one of those few Germans who had become
very much attached to the French Revolution. According to himself, all he sang was
the Marseillaise, all he clamoured for was the guillotine. Such was Engels in the year
1842. Marx was in about the same mental state. In 1842 they finally met in one
common cause.
Marx was graduated from the university and received his doctor's degree in
April, 1841. He had proposed at first to devote himself to philosophy and science, but
he gave up this idea when his teacher and friend, Bruno Bauer, who was one of the
leaders of the Young Hegelians lost his right to teach at the university because of his
severe criticism of the official theology.
It was a case of good fortune for Marx to be invited at this time to edit a
newspaper. Representatives of the more radical commercial-industrial bourgeoisie of
the Rhine province had made up their minds to found their own political organ. The
most important newspaper in the Rhine province was the Kolnische Zeitung, and
Cologne was then the greatest industrial centre of the Rhine district. The Kolnische
Zeitung cringed before the government. The Rhine radical bourgeoisie wanted their
own organ to oppose the Kolnische Zeitung and to defend their economic interests
against the feudal lords. Money was collected, but there was a dearth of literary
forces. Journals founded by capitalists fell into the hands of a group of radical
writers. Above them all towered Moses Hess (1812-1875). Moses Hess was older than
either Engels or Marx. Like Marx he was a Jew, but he very early broke away from his
rich father. He soon joined the movement for liberation, and even as far back as the
thirties, advocated the formation of a league of the cultured nations in order to insure
the winning of political and cultural freedom. In 1812, influenced by the French
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