Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/5

 in the fall of 1887, for the Austrian Labor Almanac, and which we herewith present.

Frederick Engels, the son of a manufacturer, was born in Barmen, November 28th, 1820. His home, the Rhine Province, was the most industrially and politically developed district in Germany. The nearness of England upon the one side and of France upon the other, its position on the waterway of the Rhine, its wealth of coal and metals—all these had produced in the Rhine Province, earlier than anywhere else in Germany, a powerful capitalistic industry, a revolutionary Bourgeoisie, hostile to feudalism, and also a strong proletariat that already enfolded the germ of a distinct class-consciousness. Small industrialism prevailed less in the Rhine land than anywhere else in Germany. This was one of the few German districts which possessed revolutionary traditions. For twenty years, prior to 1815, it had been as a part of the French possessions under the influence of the French Revolution, and the views and opinions created by the great Revolution were in full force during the youth of Frederick Engels.

This was also the high-tide of German philosophy. The social revolution of the eighteenth century, which in England openly took the form of an industrial revolution, in France was political, while in Germany, because of peculiar relations, it was only a mental revolution—a revolution in philosophy. While the revolution of things in Germany was slower and less complete than in France and England, the revolution of ideas was so much the more fundamental.

This reached its highest point in the Hegelian philosophy. German schoolmasters denounced this movement as a reactionary vindication of obsolete and exploded ideas. Hegel says, for example: "All that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real." (Alles was wirklich ist, ist vernunftig, und Alles, was vernunftig, ist wirklich.) The schoolmasters, who saw only the antiquated and decayed political and industrial institutions of their time, believed that according to Hegel only these were logical. They forgot that the germ of the new is no less real than the survival of the old.

Far removed from being conservative, the Hegelian philosophy is fundamentally revolutionary, not in a political but in a philosophical sense. In that it proposes the continuous transformation and overturning of existing conditions and the continuous growth of new oppositions and the