The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1884

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

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

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Conflict Between the Family and the State

Engels understands the family as a governing unit, and the only one with natural and inherent legitimacy. The state is a modern invention meant to break up this more natural condition so as to pave the way for finance capital. As a dialectical theory of history, Marxism envisions the clashing of opposite elements until a kind of synthesis is formed. The most important of these is class struggle, chiefly between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which must ultimately end in proletarian revolution. Engels’s core argument in this book is that the ruling classes rely on subsidiary institutions for their support, and chief among these is the state. The institutions of the state are meant to solidify an arrangement where the main concern is the preservation of property. Since property is distributed unequally, the enforcers of the law are not neutral arbiters, but “essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class” (215). Since property is at the center of the political system, people themselves are viewed as producers and consumers of commodities, and this is what determines their value. The agents of the state hold up this system as natural, suggesting that without it humanity would succumb to anarchy and immorality.

In Engels’s view of history, the greatest bulwark against the power of the state was the family, with the family understood as a gens, or bloodline. In Engels’s telling, the gens constituted a society, a system of mutual benefit for each and every member without distinction. The people to come out of such systems were “unspoiled,” exhibiting tremendous “personal dignity, uprightness, strength of character, and courage” because they could rely on one another (130), and their personal ambitions were sublimated to the good of the collective. The perpetuation of the bloodline was all that mattered, and so they did not need wealth or personal honors. Ultimately, the state was able to thwart this arrangement by redefining the family as the union of a husband and wife with their children—marriage had of course existed for millennia, but had been generally understood as a convenient institution for propagating the gens and was often much more fluid and provisional than the monogamous and stable marriages that, for Engels, constitute the modern norm. Once the state was able to break up the gens and replace it with the individual household, those households began to compete against one another to maximize property, without which they had no stable existence given the dilution of their bloodline. The state then completed its conquest by redefining monogamous, patriarchal marriage as the only institution that had ever existed, characterizing all other sexual arrangements as “abomination” (70). By revealing the contingency of both family structures and the state, Engels hopes to pave the way for a new family structure to rise from the ashes of the state.

The Shift From Matriarchy to Patriarchy

One of the great tragedies in human history, according to Engels, is the shift from matriarchal power, which is generally benign and natural, to patriarchal power, which is cruel and exploitative. In ancient societies, “mother right” afforded women an enormous amount of respect, because they did the actual work of bearing children, feeding them, and providing the primary care of the household. The modern family by contrast takes as a given the power of the father. Children inherit the father’s name, and property flows from paternity. Especially in Engels’s time, it could be extremely difficult for women to secure a divorce, even in cases of infidelity and abuse. Defenders of this system argue that it is entirely natural, even divinely sanctioned. The Bible posits God as a father figure, who in turn delegated authority to so-called “patriarchs” like Abraham to administer authority in his name. Jesus Christ instituted a priesthood of all men, and therefore it is fitting for men to rule in the household. Engels exposes this narrative by revealing that for much of human history, “mother right” prevailed, and that patriarchy is a relatively recent invention having much more to do with sociopolitical conditions than the apparent natural order of things. Matriarchy was in many respects a matter of practicality—a mother was the only provable parent of a particular child, and so if the intention of a society is to perpetuate its bloodline, a maternal lineage is the only way to do so with absolute certainty. There is also something more authentic in the experience of motherhood, growing, delivering, and nursing a child establishes a far more profound connection with a father, who may be responsible for conception and nothing else. In matriarchal systems, this connection was prized above all things, and the immense amount of work that a woman put into the raising of children and management of a household made her a “real lady” (80).

Mother right was closely tied to conditions of communal ownership. Engels speculates that in reality, Abraham was “not a property owner in the modern sense of the word” (84), and therefore not a true patriarch. Although the exact process is in many cases uncertain, men were eventually able to usurp the rights of mothers. As is common to all Marxist analysis, the key variable is the introduction of private property, located within particular households and no longer the common right of the gens. This radical idea was perceived as natural once men, lacking the sentimental attachment that comes out of true labor, turned women “into the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children” (87). If there is any hope, it is the fact that this condition has become so intolerable, and tied so closely to the problem of class, that it is becoming impossible to ignore.

Freedom in Barbarism

Another great tragedy in Engels’s view is the shift from “barbarism” to “civilization,” which he regards as having deprived most of humanity of many freedoms they enjoyed in less technologically advanced ages. He borrows these terms from Morgan, whose taxonomy of human social structures forms the basis for Engels’s own project of submitting the history of the family to Marxian analysis. The word “barbarian” is typically seen as a pejorative, associated with crudeness, cruelty, and backwardness. “Civilization,” by contrast, is an ideal, a benchmark of progress toward which all people are told they should aspire. Whether it was the Romans in antiquity or European settlers in America, stamping out “barbarian” ways and introducing “civilization” is a point of pride, the justification for a global mission of colonization. In Engels’s telling, this triumphant narrative is in fact the great tragedy of the human race. Aeschylus’s Oresteia epitomizes that tragedy by assigning the shift from mother right to father right as the will of the gods (40), suggesting that humanity had little control over this transition. Humanity’s barbaric period was one of “childlike simplicity” (129), but it could not hold off adulthood indefinitely. Once it encountered modern modes of production, “this organization was doomed” utterly incapable of resistance because it lacked the very notion of having to defend itself against intruders (130). It bestowed genuine freedom upon its members by immersing them in a world that simply was, had always been, and always would be, where fortunes might change in degree but the basic conditions of life would hold forever. If people did not have plenty, they were secure in what they did have, and “they knew what results they could expect making their living as they did” (145). Such a condition made social upheaval not only unnecessary but practically unthinkable.

For Engels, barbarism and the gentile constitution are closely aligned. It is not just that the barbarians were rugged, more integrated with their natural environment, and free of modern jealousies and pretensions, although all of that is important. Their key virtue was that they lived for the welfare of the group, just as the group was dedicated to the welfare of each member. This is the core of the “old communism” which prevailed and serves as a model for the communism of the future. There were of course individuals, but not individualism, which was only possible once the institution of private property turned people into rivals for wealth and honors. A collective existence frees the person from the burden of the self, granting them instead genuine fellowship and with it the ability to do as they wish. To the extent that there is any hope for the human race, it is in the lingering traces of their barbarian institutions.