The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Glossary

B

Barbarism: Morgan's technical label for the second of his three epochs, again divided into a lower stage (beginning with pottery), a middle stage (beginning, in the Old World, with animal domestication, and in the Americas, with irrigated agriculture), and a higher stage (beginning with iron smelting and ending with the invention of writing). As with savagery, the divisions track production technology — herding, farming, metallurgy — not a moral judgment; a translator's footnote in Chapter 3 explicitly cautions against reading "barbarism" or the era's association with cannibalism as more than a technical period marker. It is in the upper stage of barbarism, the era of "the Greek heroes... the Germans of Tacitus," that Engels locates the gens's final flowering and the beginnings of its dissolution into the state.; Related: Savagery, Civilization, Gentile Constitution, Private Property

C

Civilization: Morgan's and Engels's technical label for the third and final epoch, which they date from the invention of writing at the close of the upper stage of barbarism. Chapter 3 summarizes it simply as the time of "a wider utilization of natural products, of manufacturing and of art"; Chapter 11 gives the full definition: commodity production, metal coinage and money-capital, a merchant class, private property and mortgage, slave (and later wage) labor, monogamy as the economic unit of the family, and above all the state as "a machine for controlling the oppressed and exploited class." Engels treats civilization's material and scientific advances as real, but insists they were bought by turning "barefaced covetousness" into the ruling motive of society and by permanently dividing it into exploiting and exploited classes.; Related: Barbarism, The State, Private Property, Monogamy
Consanguine Family: Morgan's term for what he and Engels treat as the earliest family stage, in which marriage groups are organized by generation rather than by individual pairing: all grandparents in a family are mutual husbands and wives, as are all their children, and again all of the next generation, with only ancestors and descendants excluded from marriage. Brothers and sisters, including cousins of any degree, are within this scheme mutual husbands and wives — a practice Marx, quoted by Engels, defends against Wagnerian squeamishness: "In primeval times the sister was the wife and that was moral." No historically observed people retains this form; Engels infers its former existence only because the Hawaiian system of kinship terminology could not otherwise be explained. Modern anthropology treats Morgan's "consanguine family" as speculative reconstruction rather than an attested stage.; Related: Punaluan Family, System of Kinship, Group Marriage, The Gens

E

Endogamy: McLennan's counterpart term (Chapter 2) to exogamy, for groups required to marry within themselves, which he and much of the English "prehistoric school" treated as an independent tribal type standing in rigid, mutually exclusive opposition to exogamous tribes — an opposition Engels calls "the eye-flap that rendered impossible any free view of the field." Morgan's Ancient Society resolved the supposed contradiction by locating both practices in the same social structure at once: the gens is exogamous (its members must marry out) while the tribe made up of several intermarrying gentes is simultaneously endogamous (its members, as a whole, marry within the tribe) — a finding Engels says "gave the final blow to McLennan's artificial structure."; Related: Exogamy, The Gens, Gentile Constitution, Lewis H. Morgan
Exogamy: A term coined in 1865 by J. F. McLennan (Chapter 2) for the practice of a tribe or group being required to find spouses outside itself, which McLennan derived from a speculative sequence of female infanticide, resulting scarcity of women, polyandry, and finally wife capture from other tribes. Engels credits McLennan with identifying a genuinely widespread custom but faults him for treating exogamous and endogamous tribes as two fixed, opposed categories — an "antithesis" Engels says Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) dissolved by showing that the exogamous unit is actually the gens, nested inside the endogamous tribe that comprises many intermarrying gentes, so the two are not rival tribal types at all.; Related: Endogamy, The Gens, Lewis H. Morgan, Gentile Constitution

G

Gentile Constitution: Engels's term for the entire pre-state form of social organization built on kinship — gens, phratry, tribe, and (sometimes) a league of tribes — rather than territory or property, which Chapters 5 through 9 trace in its fullest flower among the Iroquois and in its gradual dissolution among Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Germans. It has "no soldiers, gendarmes and policemen, no nobility, kings, regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits," relying instead on public opinion, elected and instantly deposable officers, and blood revenge as its only coercive sanctions. Engels calls it doomed the moment a society divides into classes, since it "had no room either for masters or servants" and possessed no coercive machinery capable of holding rich and poor, free and slave, together — a limitation, not a design flaw, since it had simply never needed one.; Related: The Gens, The Iroquois Gens, The State, Private Property
Group Marriage: Engels's general term for family forms — the consanguine family, the Punaluan family, and the Australian marriage-class system — in which "whole groups of men and whole groups of women mutually belong to one another, leaving only small scope for jealousy." He treats it as the necessary intervening stage between an original condition of unrestricted intercourse and the pairing family, and credits the missionary Lorimer Fison's fieldwork on the Australian Kroki and Kumite marriage classes as the clearest surviving evidence of its lowest, most primitive form. Engels insists this was a regulated custom, not license — "where the European sees immorality and lawlessness, there in reality a strict law is observed" — pointedly rejecting Westermarck's claim that group marriage is merely disguised prostitution.; Related: Consanguine Family, Punaluan Family, Pairing Family, System of Kinship

H

Hetaerism: A term Bachofen introduces in 1861 (Chapter 2) for what he took to be the primeval condition of unrestricted sexual intercourse preceding mother-right — a usage Engels calls "not very felicitous." Engels and Morgan instead use the word in its narrower, original Greek sense (set out in a Chapter 4 footnote): sexual intercourse of men, single or married, with unmarried women outside the monogamous family, which presupposes that a definite form of marriage already exists and shades, in civilization, into open prostitution. Engels traces this later hetaerism directly back to group marriage — to the "sacrificial surrender" of women, originally a religious rite performed in temples of Mylitta or Anaitis, that purchased a woman's individual right to chastity — and calls it the "dark shadow" that follows monogamy through the whole of civilized history.; Related: Monogamy, Group Marriage, Mother-Right, The Patriarchal Family

L

Lewis H. Morgan: The American ethnologist whose Ancient Society (1877) is, per Engels's opening preface, the book Marx himself had intended to write up before his death — Engels states plainly that what follows is "executing a bequest." Engels credits Morgan with "rediscovering" the materialist conception of history independently, from comparing barbarism and civilization, and with two central discoveries: that family forms can be inferred backward from fossilized systems of kinship terminology, and that the Iroquois gens, Greek genos, and Roman gens are all the same institution at different stages of development. Engels states he added the Greek, Roman, Celtic, and German material himself, since Morgan had only poor secondary sources for it, and devotes much of Chapter 2 to a polemic accusing the English "prehistoric" school of quietly appropriating Morgan's results while conspiring "to kill by silence" an American who dared to criticize private property.; Related: The Gens, System of Kinship, Materialist Conception of History, The Iroquois Gens

M

Materialist Conception of History: The book's opening methodological claim, stated in Chapter 1: "the decisive element of history is pre-eminently the production and reproduction of life and its material requirements" — meaning both the production of the means of existence (food, tools, shelter) and "the generation of children, the propagation of the species." Engels argues that the less developed labor is, the more society is "under the domination of sexual ties" (i.e., organized by kinship, the gens), while growing productivity of labor generates private property, class antagonism, and eventually a society "in which family relations are entirely subordinated to property relations" and organized by the state instead. This frames the whole history of the family as determined by economic development rather than, as Engels charges against Bachofen in Chapter 2, by the evolution of religious ideas.; Related: Lewis H. Morgan, Private Property, The State, Civilization
Monogamy: Engels's specific thesis is not that individual marriage is inherently oppressive, but that historically "monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism." It develops from the pairing family once herds and slaves become the private wealth of male heads of households who want to pass that wealth to their own certain heirs, which requires "male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage" and binds only the wife, not the husband, to fidelity. Engels calls it "a great historical progress" even as he identifies it as the point where "the first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy." He distinguishes this economic account sharply from the later possibility of marriage founded on mutual "sexlove," which he treats as historically recent and, in his view, only fully realizable once property no longer needs to be inherited through a wife's fidelity.; Related: Private Property, The Patriarchal Family, Hetaerism, The Historic Defeat of the Female Sex
Mother-Right: Engels's translation of Bachofen's Mutterrecht: the exclusive reckoning of descent and inheritance through the female line, which Engels retains "for the sake of brevity" while noting that at this stage there is "no sign yet of any law in the juridic sense." It follows necessarily from group marriage, where maternity is certain but paternity cannot be known, so a child belongs to its mother's gens and property passes to her children and sisters' children rather than to a husband's kin. Engels credits Bachofen with proving, from scattered traces in classical literature, that societies governed by mother-right preceded the paternal-descent systems of historical Greece and Rome, and treats its overthrow as the pivot on which private property, monogamy, and the patriarchal family all turn. Contemporary anthropology no longer treats matrilineal descent as a universal evolutionary stage, and questions whether it implies the social authority for women that Bachofen and Engels assumed.; Related: The Gens, The Historic Defeat of the Female Sex, Lewis H. Morgan, Materialist Conception of History

P

Pairing Family: Morgan's term (syndyasmian family) for a loosely paired union of one man and one woman that either side could dissolve at will, which Engels identifies among the Iroquois and most peoples in the lower stage of barbarism. Unlike monogamy, it does not require exclusive cohabitation or lifelong fidelity from the man — polygamy and casual infidelity "remain privileges of men," though women are expected to be faithful — and children belong to the mother alone if the pair separates. It arises, in Engels's account, "on the boundary line between savagery and barbarism" as marriage restrictions born of the gens progressively narrow the old group marriage down to a single couple, without yet resting on private property or fixed paternity. Engels also argues Germanic tribes at the time of Tacitus had "not yet fully outgrown the pairing family," which he credits with the comparatively higher status of Germanic women.; Related: Group Marriage, Monogamy, The Patriarchal Family, Consanguine Family
Private Property: Engels ties the rise of private property to the domestication of herds in the Old World, the first source of wealth substantial enough to accumulate: originally owned collectively by the gens, herds passed in practice into the hands of individual family heads, who then had a motive to overturn maternal inheritance so that this new wealth would pass to their own children rather than to their gens's collective heirs. Chapters 9 and 11 extend the story to land: cultivated soil, once assigned by the gens for use only and periodically redivided, becomes individually owned, inheritable, and finally saleable "freehold," a transformation Engels treats as inseparable from the dissolution of gentile society itself. He famously notes that private ownership of land brought the mortgage in its train just as surely as monogamy brought hetaerism: "you have clamored for free, full, saleable land... there you have it."; Related: Mother-Right, Monogamy, The Mark, Gentile Constitution
Punaluan Family: Morgan's term, from the Hawaiian word for "intimate companion," for a documented Hawaiian form of group marriage in which a set of sisters (natural or collateral) were the common wives of a set of men who were not their brothers, and vice versa — the men addressed each other, not as brothers, but as punalua. Engels treats it as the classical, most-developed form of group marriage, evolved from the consanguine family by excluding first natural, then collateral, siblings from marriage. He argues it accounts precisely for the otherwise "paradoxical" American kinship terminology (where a mother's sisters' children are also called "children") and that the gens itself develops directly out of it, since the group of intermarrying sisters and their children is already, in effect, a maternal gens.; Related: Consanguine Family, Group Marriage, The Gens, System of Kinship

S

Savagery: Morgan's technical label, adopted by Engels, for the earliest of his three great epochs of human development, subdivided into a lower stage (fruit, nuts and roots gathered in trees), a middle stage (beginning with fish and the use of fire), and a higher stage (beginning with the bow and arrow). Each substage is defined strictly by advances in the production of the means of subsistence, not by any judgment of the people living in it. Engels is explicit that this is a period-of-technology classification, and the term carries none of the pejorative connotation the word "savage" has acquired in ordinary modern usage.; Related: Barbarism, Civilization, The Gens, Materialist Conception of History
Servius Tullius's Constitution: The reform Roman tradition attributes to the rex Servius Tullius, modeled, in Engels's account, on Solon's Athenian precedent: it sorted the entire population liable for military service into six classes by wealth (measured in asses) rather than by gens, organized them into 193 voting "centuries" weighted so that the wealthiest classes alone commanded a majority, and created a new public assembly (the comitia centuriata) that took over the political functions of the old kinship-based comitia curiata. Engels reads it as the moment territory and property formally displaced descent as the basis of Roman public life, degrading the curiae and gentes to "mere private and religious congregations" even before the expulsion of the last king.; Related: The Roman Gens, The State, The Attic State, Private Property
System of Kinship: Morgan's key evidentiary tool: the observation that the words a people use to address relatives (father, mother, brother, uncle, cousin, and so on) can preserve, fossil-like, the memory of an older family form that has since disappeared. Engels opens Chapter 4 with Morgan's puzzle — Iroquois kinship terms cover several hundred distinct relations that no longer match Iroquois family practice, and the same terms appear almost unchanged among the Tamils of southern India — and Marx's formulation that the family is the "active" element of society while systems of kinship are "passive," changing only long after the family itself has changed. Working backward from the Iroquois system to the still-living Hawaiian one, Morgan reconstructs the Punaluan and then the consanguine family as its necessary predecessors.; Related: The Iroquois Gens, Punaluan Family, Consanguine Family, Lewis H. Morgan

T

The 1891 Preface: Engels's preface to the fourth edition (Chapter 2), written in London in June 1891, seven years after the first edition, surveying forty years of scholarship on the family since Bachofen's Mutterrecht (1861) — including McLennan's Primitive Marriage (1865) and its exogamy/endogamy scheme, Lubbock's 1870 recognition of "communal marriage," and Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity (1871) and Ancient Society (1877), the book on which Origin of the Family is directly based. Much of it is a pointed polemic against the English "prehistoric" archaeologists who, Engels charges, quietly absorbed Morgan's findings while refusing to credit an American who had also dared to criticize private property and civilization "in language that Karl Marx might have used." The preface closes by noting translations of the book into Italian, Romanian, and Danish, with a French translation then underway.; Related: Lewis H. Morgan, Exogamy, Endogamy, Mother-Right
The Attic State: Engels's case study, following Morgan, of the purest and most direct transformation of gentile society into a state, unmarred by conquest or outside interference. It runs from the semi-legendary reforms of Theseus (a central Athenian administration and a first, informal division into nobles, farmers, and tradesmen) through the debt crisis of the 7th–6th centuries BC, in which mortgaged and enslaved small farmers forced Solon's reforms of 594 BC (cancelling debts, dividing citizens into four property classes), to Cleisthenes's revolution of 509 BC, which replaced the old kinship tribes with one hundred territorial demes and completed "the ruin of gentile law." Engels reads the whole sequence as proof that the state arises from the internal, economic breakdown of gentile society rather than from any deliberate design.; Related: Gentile Constitution, The Phratry, The State, Private Property
The Gens: Engels adopts Morgan's Latin term (plural gentes; Greek genos, from the Aryan root gan, "to beget") for the kinship clan that Morgan showed to be the basic social unit not just of American Indian tribes but, in a later paternal-descent form, of the Greek genos and Roman gens as well. A gens is a body of people who cannot marry each other, trace descent from a common ancestor, and hold rights of mutual inheritance, protection, and blood revenge — Engels calls proving the American, Greek, and Roman institutions identical one of Morgan's two great discoveries, since it unlocks "the most difficult passages of remotest ancient Greek and Roman history." The maternal gens, reckoned through women, is for Engels the original form, later overturned into the paternal gens once private property in herds gave men a motive to pass wealth to their own children. Modern anthropology has largely abandoned the assumption that all kinship-based societies pass through the same fixed sequence from maternal to paternal descent that Morgan and Engels proposed.; Related: Mother-Right, The Iroquois Gens, The Phratry, Gentile Constitution
The Historic Defeat of the Female Sex: Engels's own summary judgment on the overthrow of mother-right, stated exactly as: "The downfall of maternal law was the historic defeat of the female sex." It closes his account of how the concentration of herds and slaves in male hands gave men a motive to override maternal inheritance — the gens simply resolved that children of its male members would henceforth belong to the father's gens instead of being transferred out to their mothers' gentes. The sentence continues: "The men seized the reins also in the house, the women were stripped of their dignity, enslaved, tools of men's lust and mere machines for the generation of children" — a condition Engels says was "gradually glossed over and disguised" in later ages but "by no means obliterated." Note that Engels's own wording says historic, not "world-historic," a phrase often substituted for it in later paraphrase and translation.; Related: Mother-Right, Private Property, Monogamy, The Patriarchal Family
The Iroquois Gens: Morgan's paradigm case for the entire theory of the gens, drawn from years spent among the Seneca, one of the five Iroquois nations. The Senecas had eight gentes named for animals (Wolf, Bear, Turtle, Beaver, Deer, Snipe, Heron, Hawk), each electing and freely deposing its own sachem (peacetime office-holder) and war chief, forbidding marriage within the gens, holding mutual rights of inheritance, protection, and blood revenge, and possessing a common burial ground and gentile council in which men and women both voted. Engels quotes Morgan's summary that "liberty, equality and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens," and uses the Iroquois confederacy of five nations, governed by a federal council of fifty equal sachems with no head chief, as proof that stable, orderly society is possible entirely without a state, police, prisons, or hereditary rulers.; Related: The Gens, Gentile Constitution, The Sachem, The Phratry
The Mark: The communal landholding institution of the early Germans, described (with some uncertainty Engels candidly flags) in Caesar's and Tacitus's accounts of periodically redivided cultivated land held in common by the gens or, per Kovalevsky's later argument that Engels partly accepts, by an intermediate patriarchal household commune, with forest, pasture, and water always held collectively. After the fall of Rome, the mark commune survived as a local institution in Germany, northern France, England, and Scandinavia even as the gentile constitution around it collapsed into feudal kingship, and Engels credits it with preserving a residue of gentile democracy that gave medieval peasants, unlike Roman slaves or modern proletarians, a durable local basis for collective resistance.; Related: Gentile Constitution, Private Property, The Patriarchal Family, The State
The Patriarchal Family: Engels's narrower, intermediate sense of "patriarchal": not simply male-headed, but "the organization of a certain number of free and unfree persons into one family under the paternal authority of the head of the family," with the power of life and death over wife, children, and slaves alike. He notes that the Roman word familia originally meant only the aggregate of a man's slaves (famulus, domestic slave), not his wife and children, and treats the Roman family as the "ideal type" of this form. Citing Kovalevsky, Engels identifies the household commune found among South Slavs (the zadruga) as a still-living example of the same transitional stage between the maternal gens and the fully monogamous single family.; Related: Monogamy, Private Property, Mother-Right, The Mark
The Phratry: The kinship unit standing between the gens and the tribe, which Engels identifies as, in origin, simply the old "mother-gens" that has segmented into several "daughter" gentes as a tribe grew — so that gentes within one phratry remain, in Iroquois terms, "brother gentes" to each other. Among the Senecas the phratry organizes ball games, funerals, sachem elections, and religious "medicine lodge" societies; among the Greeks (Chapter 6) it is named by Grote and Homer as both a religious and a military unit, with its own official head (phratriarchos); among the Romans (Chapter 8) the equivalent unit, the curia, groups ten gentes, and thirty curiae compose the populus Romanus.; Related: The Gens, The Iroquois Gens, The Roman Gens, Gentile Constitution
The Roman Gens: The Roman institution Engels finds structurally identical to the Greek genos and the Iroquois gens — mutual rights of inheritance (increasingly narrowed by the twelve tablets to agnati and natural children), a common burial ground, common religious rites (sacra gentilitia), a marriage bar within the gens, and rights of mutual protection and adoption. Together, gentes formed curiae (phratries) and tribes, and only members of a gens — hence of a curia and tribe — belonged to the populus Romanus proper; the plebs, a large population of immigrants and conquered peoples who stood entirely outside this kinship structure, were personally free and taxed and conscripted but excluded from office and from the distribution of conquered land. Engels devotes a long philological argument to refuting Mommsen's claim that Roman women were required to marry inside their own gens, insisting the Roman gens, like all others Morgan describes, was exogamous.; Related: The Gens, The Phratry, Servius Tullius's Constitution, Gentile Constitution
The Sachem: The elected, peacetime office-holder of an Iroquois gens, distinct from the war chief (who commanded only in wartime and could come from outside the gens). A sachem's office was, per Chapter 5, filled by election within the gens — often passing to a nephew or brother under mother-right — then confirmed by all the other gentes and formally installed by the tribal or federal council; the whole gens, men and women alike, could depose a sachem at will, and the tribal council could depose one even against the gens's wishes. The Iroquois confederacy's federal council comprised fifty such sachems, equal in rank with no head chief at all — Engels contrasts this deposable, purely moral, non-coercive authority with the "authority" of the "lowest police employee of the civilized state," which he says exceeds that of any gentile sachem, even as no modern statesman commands the sachem's spontaneous popular esteem.; Related: The Iroquois Gens, The Gens, Gentile Constitution, The Phratry
The State: Engels's closing definition, arrived at only after tracing its emergence in Athens, Rome, and among the Germans: "The state, then, is by no means a power forced on society from outside... It is simply a product of society at a certain stage of evolution. It is the confession that this society has become hopelessly divided against itself, has entangled itself in irreconcilable contradictions which it is powerless to banish." A power that appears to stand above society is required to keep class conflict "within the bounds of order," and this power — increasingly divorced from the people, funded by taxation, and organized by territory rather than kinship — is the state. Engels explicitly rejects Hegel's account of the state as "the realization of the ethical idea," and predicts that once classes themselves become unnecessary, the state will follow them into "the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe."; Related: Gentile Constitution, The Attic State, Servius Tullius's Constitution, Civilization