The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1884

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prefaces-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-7

Chapter 8-Addendum

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 6 Summary: “The Gens and the State in Rome”

The founding of Rome was the work of three different gentes who bore the marks of an original ancestor, but who quickly intermixed with one another. Fathers passed inheritances to their children or other males within the familial line. Marriage took place outside the gens, while the gens enjoyed access to common land and promises of mutual protection from fellow members. Adoption could secure new members, and all offices, even that of the king, were elected. A woman who married into a gens became a member of that gens and could inherit her husband’s property upon his death, but would be expected to choose a new husband from within her deceased husband’s gens. Despite being a much looser system than the Iroquois, the unit of the gens endured for centuries in Rome, with membership in a gens essential for citizenship. The Roman Senate originated as a council of elders from various gentes (the term senatus in Latin derives from senex, meaning “old man”). Rome sometimes conferred temporary military leadership on individuals from outside the Roman gentes but gave them “no civil authority whatever, nor any power over the life, liberty, and property of citizens” (162). Despite the early flowering of state and class-based institutions, the constitution was rooted in the life of the gens. As Rome expanded and brought in new inhabitants, these people could own property but could not hold office, although their power grew as they tended to fill the ranks of the army.

A new Roman constitution divided the population first by eligibility for military service, and then by how much property the eligible owned, with the wealthiest having the most representation. From this point on the gens became a “mere private and religious association” (164), and once the Roman Republic was established, this only accelerated the development of a society based on classes rather than bloodline, sowing the seeds of its own downfall.

Chapter 7 Summary: “The Gens Among Celts and Germans”

In Wales and Scotland, the institution of the gens prevailed well into the Middle Ages. In Wales, marriages were easily dissolvable in the first seven years, and couples who had been together for seven years were considered married even if they had not had a formal ceremony. Promiscuity outside of marriage was entirely permissible, even for girls, and women could initiate divorce on grounds as thin as “bad breath” (167). Women could vote in assemblies, and marriages tended to be fluid “pairing” arrangements, not surprising for people who “even so late as Caesar’s time were still living in group marriage” (168). In Ireland, land was the common property of the gens until the English conquest, and Ireland still exhibits some remnants of those old arrangements. Likewise, Scottish clans were the dominant entity until the failed Jacobite uprising of 1745. The Germans were undoubtedly a people rooted in gentes, even after Roman times. The Roman historian Tacitus described some Germans as matriarchal, and even in the age of the Vikings many centuries later, “the memory of the mother right had not yet been obliterated in Scandinavia” (173). Yet even in Roman times, some Germans were moving toward patriarchy, although traces of mother right remained. Women and girls among the Germans had more rights and social status than their Roman counterparts, and Engels suspects Tacitus of overstating the strictures of marriage within German culture, since his own perspective treated that as natural. The most important fact about the Germans is that they held land in common for many centuries, and ultimately it was sustained contact with Rome that sent their tribal institutions into decline. Yet even Tacitus had to admit that the Germans had real popular assemblies, appointed officers based on merit rather than heredity, and denied political power to military leaders. Eventually, however, certain war leaders were able to build what were essentially private armies, for whom “plunder became an end in itself” (180), eventually turning into mercenary bands who treated their leader as a king.

Chapters 6-7 Analysis

Even as Greece was subjugated under the iron rule of Rome, its culture had a transformative influence on Roman institutions. Greek traditions of art, philosophy, and literature would form the foundation of a culture that would allow the militaristic Romans to spread what is now called “soft power” across Europe. In this pair of chapters, Engels gives this idea an entirely new meaning. Rome, like everyone else, began with a gentile constitution, spending a surprising amount of time insisting that a woman who had married into a gens would have to remarry within the same gens. The conventional history of Rome focuses on the overthrow of the monarchy, conveyed in legend as a popular uprising against the tyrannical Tarquin family, replacing it with the Roman Republic which is widely celebrated as an early form of democracy. Engels’s Marxist historiography entirely reframes this story as a class conflict between patricians and plebeians which only hardened with the founding of the Republic. Engels is thus more interested in another cultural innovation that the Romans may have borrowed from the Greeks: The Shift from Matriarchy to Patriarchy. The Romans underwent this shift more as a consequence of military expansion rather than commerce. The introduction of a large population from outside the city laid the foundation for class warfare, as these non-citizens formed the bulk of the army even as they were “excluded from all public rights” (163). To keep this potentially unruly contingent in line, Rome revised its constitution from one “based on personal ties of blood” to one “based on territorial division and difference of wealth” (164), which could only result in the eventual rise of emperors to secure the wealth of the most prominent patricians.

The tribes of Germany and Britain represent a great hope for Engels as peoples who held fast to at least some “barbarian” institutions for many centuries after the Greeks and Romans stamped them out. Theirs was a “model constitution of the upper stage of barbarism” (181), with some primitive forms of state institutions but largely keeping the gens intact. Ultimately, however, their example proved to be another showdown in The Conflict Between the Family and the State, with predictable results. Just as the Romans conquered Greece only to absorb its patriarchal institutions, the same tragedy would befall the barbarians at their moment of triumph. They would conquer Rome, only to be conquered by Roman institutions.