Just as Darwin had sought to uncover the processes of organic evolution, the pioneer anthropologists searched for the origin and evolution of social life.

Morgan and his school wrote during the time of Darwin when the theory of evolution was first enunciated and its fresh breezes were sweeping the western world. This discovery, he said, held the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution had for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy. Engels gave unstinting praise to Morgan’s thesis that the maternal gens or clan preceded the father-family in history, proving that even the family institution is no exception to that rule. Morgan’s data confirmed the Marxist principle that social institutions are not unchanging or eternal but come into existence at certain periods of history as a result of specific socioeconomic conditions. These topics became the title of Engels’s book. Through his careful research, pursued over forty years, Morgan unwittingly spotlighted the fact that the key institutions of civilized society - the family, private property, and the state - were nonexistent in prehistoric life. Utilizing these fragmentary materials, Engels carried out the assignment that his collaborator had initiated, as he had done for the unfinished second and third volumes of Capital.īoth men were struck by the fact that Morgan had in his own way taken a materialist approach to the study of primitive society. Marx immediately began making notes on it to spell out his own conclusions.

Maxim Kovalevsky, the Russian ethnologist, had brought a copy of Morgan’s book from the United States to England for Marx to read. This graphically confirms what Frederick Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.Īlthough the book was not published until after Marx’s death, it was, as Engels said, a joint project born from the constant interchange of views over decades between the two men on the origins of civilization and its institutions.

of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad, which features massive statues and carvings of kings and their male servants during this period in the “cradle of civilization.” Rise of class-divided society degraded the status of women, images of whom were frequent a millennia earlier.

BY EVELYN REED Militant/Ögmundur JónssonThe only statue of a woman in Neo-Assyrian galleries - covering 911-612 B.C.

Family private property and the state