Autodidact in Philosophy

Abstract

At 20 Engels’s future was unclear. His father’s point of view, we may imagine, was that young Friedrich had finished his commercial secondment in Bremen and was now ready to pursue another aspect of the textile business, presumably the manufacturing side in Germany or in England. This plan was subject, of course, to his obligation to complete a period of national service or obtain an exemption. The elder Engels may have thought that perhaps a period at home, some travel abroad and possibly a stretch in the army, would clear the youth’s head of the unsettling liberal politics, frivolous literary interests and other wild ideas that he had picked up in Bremen.