The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Seven years after the text was first printed, Engels has made some revisions, in part to fill gaps that he claims many critics would wish remained unfilled. The work has been published in many languages, helping to spread the concept of a history of the family, a relatively new subject of academic inquiry. The “patriarchal family” of the modern West is taken as the standard, essentially equivalent to the Biblical account of family, while traditions from other cultures are dismissed as curiosities. He cites Johann Bachofen’s analysis of early cultures as being polysexual, with lineage traced from the mother due to the certainty of maternal parentage, until certain religious developments prompted a shift to monogamy, and ultimately the domination of men. He looks at Aeschylus’s cycle of plays The Oresteia as representing a transfer in authority from mother to father, as the gods forgive Orestes for killing his mother, since she was guilty of killing his father. Engels asserts that while Bachofen has made a valuable contribution, he errs in overvaluing the role of religion. Nonetheless, his work helped to show that women once enjoyed a great deal more freedom, both sexually and socially, than under the current system of patriarchal monogamy.

Engels cites the Scottish social anthropologist John Ferguson McLennan as having introduced the field of the history of the family to an English language audience. McLennan’s work examines the customs of determining what makes a person eligible or ineligible for marriage within different cultures, and how certain practices such as bride-theft evolved from the relative paucity of female members within a tribe (often due to infanticide). Other scholars, including Morgan, challenge McLennan on the grounds that “consanguinity”—building families off existing bloodlines, often through group marriage—is more widely practiced than “exogamy”—acquiring wives from outsiders—as McLennan argues (45-47). Morgan also explains more clearly how patriarchy emerged historically from earlier matriarchy, aligning it with a fellow evolutionary theory like Marxism. If Morgan’s ideas are not being taken seriously, Engels blames this on a bias against American scholars and on fear of radical change: Admitting the possibility of a radically different family unit opens the door to Marxist notions of “a future transformation” of society itself. It is time for his ideas to have their proper hearing and application to contemporary social science.

According to Morgan, humankind begins in a condition of so-called “savagery” in which humans are little more than slightly more sophisticated primates capable of living in tall trees to avoid predators. The development of fire, and the consequent ability to cook meat, enabled mass migrations across the globe, generating new sources of food and tools for its acquisition, but still requiring cannibalism for a consistent food source. Then, the development of the bow and arrow made true hunting possible, for both food and game, allowing human beings to have a more settled existence and develop other tools such as axes and canoes.

The next stage is “barbarism,” characterized mainly by the domestication of animals in Europe and the development of agriculture in the Americas. The pastoral life that developed in Europe, overseeing large herds of livestock on grasslands, prompted migrations in search of more favorable land. According to Morgan, with a heartier diet, Europeans developed larger brains than Indigenous people, who thrived almost entirely on vegetables, and as a result, the Europeans were first to pass into the “higher stage” of barbarism (55), marked by the development of iron ore. The wealth of technology that springs from iron marks the passage from barbarism to civilization, as people are inventing not only things but also culture and art.