Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) spent two periods of his life in Manchester (1842-1844 and 1849-1869). In 1842, Engels was sent by his parents to Manchester to work for the Ermen and Engels’ Victoria Mill in Weaste which made sewing threads. In Manchester Engels wrote his first economic work, ‘Outline of a Critique of Political Economy’ (1843).

While observing the slums of Manchester, Engels took notes on child labor, the despoiled environment and overworked and impoverished laborers and sent a series of articles to Marx, chronicling the conditions amongst the working class in Manchester. These he would later collect and publish in his influential first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). In this book, Engels described in detail the machinery used in the industrial plants, the way the workers used to operate the machinery and the conditions in which the working people were living in these plants.

During the second period of his stay in Manchester, despite his work at the mill, Engels found time to write his famous work on Luther, the Reformation and the revolutionary war of the peasants in 1525 (The Peasant War in Germany).

Engels followed developments in science very closely. He planned a major work setting out his approach to science, its history, place in society and the philosophical arguments surrounding it – but never completed it. Notes survive – some complete chapters, others in very rough form – which have been collected together and published as The Dialectics of Nature. Engels never managed to fully develop his ideas. He was forced to break off work on The Dialectics of Nature to deal with arguments inside the then growing socialist movement. In Germany a now long forgotten professor, Dühring, had become fashionable among sections of the German workers’ movement. Engels was urged by Marx, to write a polemic against Eugene Dühring. Engels intended to resume work on The Dialectics of Nature, but was prevented from doing so by Marx’s death.

This Symposium will develop along two axes: In the first axis we will analyze the actuality of Engels work, his influence on debates in the history and philosophy of science and technology throughout the 20th century and discuss its critics highlighting that Engels developed methods which are essential today for any further advance in the understanding of science and its utilisation for human welfare.

In the second axis we will explore in detail Engel’s work, especially The Dialectics of Nature, which has attracted a large body of criticism. Emphasis will be given in Hegel’s ambivalent influence on the work of Engels and also in Engels contribution in the unveiling of the historical dimension of the physical world.