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The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Paperback

PhilosophyGeneral World HistorySocial Movements

ISBN10: 1983816787
ISBN13: 9781983816789
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Jan 13 2018
Pages: 252
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.53 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
Engels composed Origin, published in 1884, from notes he and Marx had made from their reading of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). Regarding Morgan, Engels says, in his own way [he] discovered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history discovered by Marx 40 years ago. Morgan's study involves analysis of the social organization of the Iroquois nation from an anthropological perspective. This analysis of barbarian Iroquois society (barbarian being a value neutral term for the stage of societal development between savage and civilization), structured upon a gens system (a complicated familial system to be contrasted with the bourgeois, patriarchal, nuclear family), is used as the basis from which to trace the emergence of civilization and its attendant class divisions, rise of the commodity, suppression of women, and rise of the state. After a description of the Iroquois society, Engels describes the transformation of the gens-based organizations of society in Athens, Rome, and Germany into state organizations with their attendant divisions of classes, development of slavery, etc. All of which would tend to feel like a fall from a state of egalitarianism into an oppressive civilization. But there is, of course, no return.

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