The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Contents

1. Translator’s Preface (1902) 7 min 2

   Ernest Untermann introduces his 1902 American translation as a socialist answer to the claim that existing society and its hierarchies are divinely ordained. Morgan’s research showed that social institutions evolve, but stopped short of the conclusion Engels draws: the existence of class struggle.

2. Preface to the First Edition (1884) 5 min 5

   Engels explains that the book carries out a plan of Marx’s, who had studied Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society and believed Morgan had independently rediscovered the materialist conception of history. He states its key principle: history is shaped by two kinds of production, of the means of life and of human beings themselves. In early societies kinship organises everything; as productivity and private property grow, kinship-based society gives way to class society and the state.

3. Preface to the Fourth Edition (1891) 32 min 13

   A survey of research on the history of the family. Until the 1860s the biblical patriarchal family was assumed to be eternal. Bachofen (1861) discovered mother right and interpreted the Oresteia as the myth of its defeat, but explained history through religion; McLennan (1865) introduced exogamy and endogamy but created confusion; Morgan (1871, 1877) used kinship terminologies to reconstruct earlier family forms and showed that the gens organised by mother right preceded the Greek and Roman gens. Engels accuses British anthropologists of ignoring Morgan’s achievement.

4. I Prehistoric Stages 15 min 6

   Morgan’s scheme of human prehistory: savagery (lower, middle, upper stages, marked by speech, fire and fishing, and the bow and arrow) and barbarism (pottery, domestication of animals or cultivation of plants, iron-working), leading to civilization with writing. Each stage is defined by advances in producing the means of subsistence. The chapter reflects nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology and its racial assumptions, both since abandoned.

5. II The Family 2 h 12 min 37

   The core of the book. From kinship terminologies Morgan reconstructed a sequence of family forms, from primeval promiscuity through group marriage (consanguine and punaluan families) to the pairing family and monogamy, most of which later anthropology rejected. Engels’s lasting argument is about the transition to patriarchy: when men acquired herds, slaves and other private wealth, they overturned descent through the mother so their own children could inherit, “the historic defeat of the female sex.” Monogamy arose not from love but from property, as monogamy for women only, accompanied by prostitution; the first class oppression was that of women by men. Modern legal equality hides economic inequality in marriage as in the wage contract, and women’s emancipation requires their full entry into social production and the socialisation of housework and childcare. Engels ends with the history of romantic love and declines to prescribe the family of the future.

6. III The Iroquois Gens 38 min 9

   The gens among the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee): a group descended from a common ancestor in the female line, forbidden to marry within itself, electing and deposing its own chiefs, with rights of inheritance, mutual aid, adoption and a council of all adults. Gentes combine into phratries, tribes and the Iroquois League with its federal council of fifty sachems. Engels admires this society without state, police or prisons, but stresses that it rested on low productivity and was doomed by the growth of wealth and class division.

7. IV The Grecian Gens 22 min 6

   The same organisation among the early Greeks: gens, phratry, tribe and league, now with descent in the male line. Homeric society was a “military democracy” of assembly, council and elected war chief (basileus), but the rise of private wealth, inheritance in the father’s line and slavery was already undermining it. A new institution was needed to protect private property and the rule of the rich: the state.

8. V Origin of the Attic State 28 min 7

   How the Athenian state arose. Money, private land, debt and debt slavery broke up gentile society; Solon’s reforms (594 BCE) cancelled debts and graded political rights by wealth; Cleisthenes’ reforms (508/507 BCE) replaced kinship tribes with territorial districts. The state is defined by organisation by territory and a public force separate from the people, and Athenian democracy rested on slavery.

9. VI Gens and State in Rome 27 min 7

   The Roman gens and its replacement by the state: gentes, curiae and tribes, the conflict of patricians and plebeians, and the Servian constitution, which organised citizens by property and military service. The Republic’s history turns on conflicts over public land, ending in the ruin of small farmers and the rise of the emperors.

10. VII The Gens Among Celts and Germans 35 min 9

    Traces of gentile organisation among the Celts (Irish septs and Scottish clans, destroyed by English conquest) and the ancient Germans as described by Caesar and Tacitus: the special bond with the mother’s brother as a relic of mother right, the respect for women, the pairing family, blood revenge and wergeld, household and village communities, assemblies, and the war-bands from which kingship grew.

11. VIII The Rise of the State Among Germans 28 min 12

    The fall of Rome and the rise of the Germanic kingdoms. The exhausted, overtaxed empire collapsed; slavery gave way to the colonate, forerunner of serfdom; the Germanic conquerors, organised in gentes, founded new states in which royal power and a new nobility grew out of conquest and the king’s following. Engels rejects racial explanations of the Germans’ role: they renewed Europe through their social organisation, and serfdom, unlike slavery, allowed gradual emancipation as a class.

12. IX Barbarism and Civilization 53 min 24

    Engels’s general theory. Successive divisions of labour (herding, crafts, merchants) and growing productivity created surplus, exchange, money, private property and slavery, splitting society into classes and destroying the gentile order. The state is the product of irreconcilable class antagonism: a power apparently above society, organised by territory, with its own armed force and taxes, normally the instrument of the economically dominant class, but occasionally balancing between classes as under absolutism and Bonapartism. It will disappear with classes, into the “Museum of Antiquities.” Civilization rests on successive forms of exploitation (slavery, serfdom, wage labour), and the book ends with Morgan’s vision of a revival, in higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.