The earlier large editions of this work have been out of print

now for almost half a year, and for some time the publisher has been asking me

to prepare a new edition. Until now, more urgent work kept me from doing so.

Since the appearance of the first edition seven years have elapsed, during

which our knowledge of the primitive forms of the family has made important

advances. There was, therefore, plenty to do in the way of improvements and

additions; all the more so as the proposed stereotyping of the present text

will make any further alterations impossible for some time.

I have accordingly submitted the whole text to a careful revision and made a

number of additions which, I hope, take due account of the present state of

knowledge. I also give in the course of this preface a short review of the

development of the history of the family from Bachofen to Morgan; I do so

chiefly because the chauvinistically inclined English anthropologists are still

striving their utmost to kill by silence the revolution which Morgan’s

discoveries have effected in our conception of primitive history, while they

appropriate his results without the slightest compunction. Elsewhere also the

example of England is in some cases followed only too closely.

My work has been translated into a number of other languages. First,

Italian: L’origine delta famiglia, delta proprieta privata e dello stato,

versions riveduta dall’autore, di Pasquale Martignetti, Benevento, 1885.

Then, Rumanian: Origina famdei, proprietatei private si a statului, traducere

de Joan Nadeide, in the Yassy periodical Contemporanul, September, 1885, to

May, 1886. Further, Danish: Familjens, Privatejendommens og Statens Oprindelse,

Dansk, af Forfattern gennemgaaet Udgave, besorget af Gerson Trier, Kobenhavn,

1888. A French translation by Henri Rave, based on the present German edition,

is on the press.

Before the beginning of the sixties, one cannot speak of a history of

the family. In this field, the science of history was still completely under

the influence of the five books of Moses. The patriarchal form of the family,

which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only

assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified

– minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that

the family had really experienced no historical development at all; at most it

was admitted that in primitive times there might have been a period of sexual

promiscuity. It is true that in addition to the monogamous form of the family,

two other forms were known to exist – polygamy in the Orient and

polyandry in India and Tibet; but these three forms could not be arranged in

any historical order and merely appeared side by side without any connection.

That among some peoples of ancient history, as well as among some savages still

alive today, descent was reckoned, not from the father, but from the mother,

and that the female line was therefore regarded as alone valid; that among many

peoples of the present day in every continent marriage is forbidden within

certain large groups which at that time had not been closely studied –

these facts were indeed known and fresh instances of them were continually

being collected. But nobody knew what to do with them, and even as late as E.

B. Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind, etc. (1865) they

are listed as mere “curious customs”, side by side with the

prohibition among some savages against touching burning wood with an iron tool

and similar religious mumbo-jumbo.

The history of the family dates from 1861, from the publication of

Bachofen’s Mutterrecht. [Mother-right, matriarchate – Ed.] In this

work the author advances the following propositions:

(1) That originally man lived in a state of sexual

promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term

“hetaerism”;

(2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of

paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female

line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst

all the peoples of antiquity;

(3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of

the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of

such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen’s

conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);

(4) that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged

to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that

is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this

woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence

for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period.

Bachofen finds the proofs of these assertions in innumerable passages of

ancient classical literature, which he collected with immense industry.

According to him, the development from “hetaerism” to monogamy and

from mother-right to father-right is accomplished, particularly among the

Greeks, as the consequence of an advance in religious conceptions, introducing

into the old hierarchy of the gods, representative of the old outlook, new

divinities, representative of the new outlook, who push the former more and

more into the background. Thus, according to Bachofen, it is not the

development of men’s actual conditions of life, but the religious

reflection of these conditions inside their heads, which has brought about the

historical changes in the social position of the sexes in relation to each

other. In accordance with this view, Bachofen interprets the Oresteia of

Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining

mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic

age. For the sake of her paramour, Ægisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband,

Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon

and herself, avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother. For this

act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right,

according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime. But

Apollo, who by the voice of his oracle had summoned Orestes to this deed, and

Athena, who is called upon to give judgment – the two deities who here

represent the new patriarchal order – take Orestes under their

protection; Athena hears both sides. The whole matter of the dispute is briefly

summed up in the debate which now takes place between Orestes and the Furies.

Orestes contends that Clytemnestra has committed a double crime; she has slain

her husband and thus she has also slain his father. Why should the Furies

pursue him, and not her, seeing that she is by far the more guilty? The answer

is striking: “She was not kin by blood to the man she slew.”

The murder of a man not related by blood, even if he be the husband of the

murderess, is expiable and does not concern the Furies; their office is solely

to punish murder between blood relations, and of such murders the most grave

and the most inexpiable, according to mother-right, is matricide. Apollo now

comes forward in Orestes’ defense; Athena calls upon the Areopagites

– the Athenian jurors – to vote; the votes for Orestes’

condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her

vote for Orestes and acquits him. Father-right has triumphed over mother-right,

the “gods of young descent,” as the Furies themselves call them,

have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be

persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order.

This new but undoubtedly correct interpretation of the Oresteia is one of

the best and finest passages in the whole book, but it proves at the same time

that Bachofen believes at least as much as Æschylus did in the Furies, Apollo,

and Athena; for, at bottom, he believes that the overthrow of mother-right by

father-right was a miracle wrought during the Greek heroic age by these

divinities. That such a conception, which makes religion the lever of world

history, must finally end in pure mysticism, is clear. It is therefore a tough

and by no means always a grateful task to plow through Bachofen’s solid

tome. But all that does not lessen his importance as a pioneer. He was the

first to replace the vague phrases about some unknown primitive state of sexual

promiscuity by proofs of the following facts: that abundant traces survive in

old classical literature of a state prior to monogamy among the Greeks and

Asiatics when not only did a man have sexual intercourse with several women,

but a woman with several men, without offending against morality; that this

custom did not disappear without leaving its traces in the limited surrender

which was the price women had to pay for the right to monogamy; that therefore

descent could originally be reckoned only in the female line, from mother to

mother; that far into the period of monogamy, with its certain or at least

acknowledged paternity, the female line was still alone recognized; and that

the original position of the mothers, as the only certain parents of their

children, secured for them, and thus for their whole sex, a higher social

position than women have ever enjoyed since. Bachofen did not put these

statements as clearly as this, for he was hindered by his mysticism. But he

proved them; and in 1861 that was a real revolution.

Bachofen’s massive volume was written in German, the language of the

nation which at that time interested itself less than any other in the

prehistory of the modern family. Consequently, he remained unknown. His first

successor in the same field appeared in 1865, without ever having heard of

Bachofen.

This successor was J. F. McLennan, the exact opposite of his predecessor.

Instead of a mystic of genius, we have the dry-as-dust jurist; instead of the

exuberant imagination of a poet, the plausible arguments of a barrister

defending his brief. McLennan finds among many savage, barbarian, and even

civilized peoples of ancient and modern times a form of marriage in which the

bridegroom, alone or with his friends, must carry off the bride from her

relations by a show of force. This custom must be the survival of an earlier

custom when the men of one tribe did in fact carry off their wives by force

from other tribes. What was the origin of this “marriage by

capture”? So long as men could find enough women in their own tribe,

there was no reason whatever for it. We find, however, no less frequently that

among undeveloped peoples there are certain groups (which in 1865 were still

often identified with the tribes themselves) within which marriage is

forbidden, so that the men are obliged to take their wives, and women their

husbands, from outside the group; whereas among other peoples the custom is

that the men of one group must take their wives only from within their own

group. McLennan calls the first peoples “exogamous” and the second

“endogamous”; he then promptly proceeds to construct a rigid

opposition between exogamous and endogamous “tribes.” And although

his own investigations into exogamy force the fact under his nose that in many,

if not in most or even in all, cases, this opposition exists only in his own

imagination, he nevertheless makes it the basis of his whole theory. According

to this theory, exogamous tribes can only obtain their wives from other tribes;

and since in savagery there is a permanent state of war between tribe and

tribe, these wives could only be obtained by capture. McLennan then goes on to

ask: Whence this custom of exogamy? The conception of consanguinity and incest

could not have anything to do with it, for these things only came much later.

But there was another common custom among savages–the custom of killing

female children immediately after birth. This would cause a surplus of men in

each individual tribe, of which the inevitable and immediate consequence would

be that several men possessed a wife in common: polyandry. And this would have

the further consequence that it would be known who was the mother of a child,

but not who its father was: hence relationship only in the female line, with

exclusion of the male line – mother-right. And a second consequence of

the scarcity of women within a tribe – a scarcity which polyandry

mitigated, but did not remove – was precisely this systematic, forcible

abduction of women from other tribes.

As exogamy and polyandry are referable to one and the same

cause – a want of balance between the sexes–we are forced to regard

all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous ... Therefore we

must hold it to be beyond dispute that among exogamous races the first system

of kinship was that which recognized blood-ties through mothers only.

(McLennan, Studies in Ancient History, 1886. Primitive

Marriage, p. 124)

It is McLennan’s merit to have directed attention to the general

occurrence and great importance of what he calls exogamy. He did not by any

means discover the existence of exogamous groups; still less did he understand

them. Besides the early, scattered notes of many observers (these were

McLennan’s sources), Latham (Descriptive Ethnology, 1859) had given a

detailed and accurate description of this institution among the Indian Magars,

and had said that it was very widespread and occurred in all parts of the world

– a passage which McLennan himself cites. Morgan, in 1847, in his letters

on the Iroquois (American Review) and in 1851 in The League of the

Iroquois, had already demonstrated the existence of exogamous groups among

this tribe and had given an accurate account of them; whereas McLennan, as we

shall see, wrought greater confusion here with his legalistic mind than

Bachofen wrought in the field of mother-right with his mystical fancies. It is

also a merit of McLennan that he recognized matrilineal descent as the earlier

system, though he was here anticipated by Bachofen, as he later acknowledged.

But McLennan is not clear on this either; he always speaks of “kinship

through females only,” and this term, which is correct for an earlier

stage, he continually applies to later stages of development when descent and

inheritance were indeed still traced exclusively through the female line, but

when kinship on the male side was also recognized and expressed. There you have

the pedantic mind of the jurist, who fixes on a rigid legal term and goes on

applying it unchanged when changed conditions have made it applicable no

longer.

Apparently McLennan’s theory, plausible though it was, did not seem

any too well established even to its author. At any rate, he himself is struck

by the fact that “it is observable that the form of capture is now most

distinctly marked and impressive just among those races which have male

kinship” (should be “descent in the male line”). (Ibid., p.

140) And again: “It is a curious fact that nowhere now, that we are aware

of, is infanticide a system where exogamy and the earliest form of kinship

co-exist.” (Ibid., p. 146.) Both these facts flatly contradict his method

of explanation, and he can only meet them with new and still more complicated

hypotheses.

Nevertheless, his theory found great applause and support in England.

McLennan was here generally regarded as the founder of the history of the

family and the leading authority on the subject. However many exceptions and

variations might be found in individual cases, his opposition of exogamous and

endogamous tribes continued to stand as the recognized foundation of the

accepted view, and to act as blinders, obstructing any free survey of the field

under investigation and so making any decisive advance impossible. Against

McLennan’s exaggerated reputation in England – and the English

fashion is copied elsewhere – it becomes a duty to set down the fact that

he has done more harm with his completely mistaken antithesis between exogamous

and endogamous “tribes” than he has done good by his research.

Facts were now already coming to light in increasing number which did not

fit into his neat framework. McLennan knew only three forms of marriage:

polygyny, polyandry and monogamy. But once attention had been directed to the

question, more and more proofs were found that there existed among undeveloped

peoples forms of marriage in which a number of men possessed a number of women

in common, and Lubbock (The Origin of Civilization, 1870) recognized

this group marriage (“communal marriage”) as a historical fact.

Immediately afterwards, in 1871, Morgan came forward with new and in many

ways decisive evidence. He had convinced himself that the peculiar system of

consanguinity in force among the Iroquois was common to all the aboriginal

inhabitants of the United States and therefore extended over a whole continent,

although it directly contradicted the degrees of relationship arising out of

the system of marriage as actually practiced by these peoples. He then induced

the Federal government to collect information about the systems of

consanguinity among the other peoples of the world and to send out for this

purpose tables and lists of questions prepared by himself. He discovered from

the replies: (1) that the system of consanguinity of the American Indians was

also in force among numerous peoples in Asia and, in a somewhat modified form,

in Africa and Australia; (2) that its complete explanation was to be found in a

form of group marriage which was just dying out in Hawaii and other

Australasian islands; and (3) that side by side with this form of marriage a

system of consanguinity was in force in the same islands which could only be

explained through a still more primitive, now extinct, form of group marriage.

He published the collected evidence, together with the conclusions he drew from

it, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity, 1871, and thus carried the

debate on to an infinitely wider field. By starting from the systems of

consanguinity and reconstructing from them the corresponding forms of family,

he opened a new line of research and extended our range of vision into the

prehistory of man. If this method proved to be sound, McLennan’s pretty

theories would be completely demolished.

McLennan defended his theory in a new edition of Primitive Marriage

(Studies in Ancient History, 1876). Whilst he himself constructs a

highly artificial history of the family out of pure hypotheses, he demands from

Lubbock and Morgan not merely proofs for every one of their statements, but

proofs as indisputably valid as if they were to be submitted in evidence in a

Scottish court of law. And this is the man who, from Tacitus’ report on

the close relationship between maternal uncle and sister’s son among the

Germans (Germania, Chap. 20), from Caesar’s report that the

Britons in groups of ten or twelve possessed their wives in common, from all

the other reports of classical authors on community of wives among barbarians,

calmly draws the conclusion that all these peoples lived in a state of

polyandry! One might be listening to a prosecuting counsel who can allow

himself every liberty in arguing his own case, but demands from defending

counsel the most formal, legally valid proof for his every word.

He maintains that group marriage is pure imagination, and by so doing falls

far behind Bachofen. He declares that Morgan’s systems of consanguinity

are mere codes of conventional politeness, the proof being that the Indians

also address a stranger or a white man as brother or father. One might as well

say that the terms “father,” “mother,”

“brother,” “sister” are mere meaningless forms of

address because Catholic priests and abbesses are addressed as

“father” and “mother,” and because monks and nuns, and

even freemasons and members of English trade unions and associations at their

full sessions are addressed as “brother” and “sister.”

In a word, McLennan’s defense was miserably feeble.

But on one point he had still not been assailed. The opposition of exogamous

and endogamous “tribes” on which his whole system rested not only

remained unshaken, but was even universally acknowledged as the keystone of the

whole history of the family. McLennan’s attempt to explain this

opposition might be inadequate and in contradiction with his own facts. But the

antithesis itself, the existence of two mutually exclusive types of

self-sufficient and independent tribes, of which the one type took their wives

from within the tribe, while the other type absolutely forbade it – that

was sacred gospel. Compare, for example, Giraud-Teulon’s Origines de

la Famille (1874) and even Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization

(fourth edition, 1882).

Here Morgan takes the field with his main work, Ancient Society

(1877), the work that underlies the present study. What Morgan had only dimly

guessed in 1871 is now developed in full consciousness. There is no antithesis

between endogamy and exogamy; up to the present, the existence of exogamous

“tribes” has not been demonstrated anywhere. But at the time when

group marriage still prevailed – and in all probability it prevailed

everywhere at some time – the tribe was subdivided into a number of

groups related by blood on the mother’s side, gentes, within which it was

strictly forbidden to marry, so that the men of a gens, though they could take

their wives from within the tribe and generally did so, were compelled to take

them from outside their gens. Thus while each gens was strictly exogamous, the

tribe embracing all the gentes was no less endogamous. Which finally disposed

of the last remains of McLennan’s artificial constructions.

But Morgan did not rest here. Through the gens of the American Indians, he

was enabled to make his second great advance in his field of research. In this

gens, organized according to mother-right, he discovered the primitive form out

of which had developed the later gens organized according to father-right, the

gens as we find it among the ancient civilized peoples. The Greek and Roman

gens, the old riddle of all historians, now found its explanation in the Indian

gens, and a new foundation was thus laid for the whole of primitive history.

This rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of

the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same importance for

anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and

Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy. It enabled Morgan

to outline for the first time a history of the family in which for the present,

so far as the material now available permits, at least the classic stages of

development in their main outlines are now determined. That this opens a new

epoch in the treatment of primitive history must be clear to everyone. The

matriarchal gens has become the pivot on which the whole science turns; since

its discovery we know where to look and what to look for in our research, and

how to arrange the results. And, consequently, since Morgan’s book,

progress in this field has been made at a far more rapid speed.

Anthropologists, even in England, now generally appreciate, or rather

appropriate, Morgan’s discoveries. But hardly one of them has the honesty

to admit that it is to Morgan that we owe this revolution in our ideas. In

England they try to kill his book by silence, and dispose of its author with

condescending praise for his earlier achievements; they niggle endlessly over

details and remain obstinately silent about his really great discoveries. The

original edition of Ancient Society is out of print; in America there

is no sale for such things; in England, it seems, the book was systematically

suppressed, and the only edition of this epochmaking work still circulating in

the book trade is – the German translation.

Why this reserve? It is difficult not to see in it a conspiracy of silence;

for politeness’ sake, our recognized anthropologists generally pack their

writings with quotations and other tokens of camaraderie. Is it, perhaps,

because Morgan is an American, and for the English anthropologists it goes

sorely against the grain that, despite their highly creditable industry in

collecting material, they should be dependent for their general points of view

in the arrangement and grouping of this material, for their ideas in fact, on

two foreigners of genius, Bachofen and Morgan? They might put up with the

German – but the American? Every Englishman turns patriotic when he comes

up against an American, and of this I saw highly entertaining instances in the

United States. Moreover, McLennan was, so to speak, the officially appointed

founder and leader of the English school of anthropology. It was almost a

principle of anthropological etiquette to speak of his artificially constructed

historical series – child-murder, polygyny, marriage by capture,

matriarchal family – in tones only of profoundest respect. The slightest

doubt in the existence of exogamous and endogamous “tribes” of

absolute mutual exclusiveness was considered rank heresy. Morgan had committed

a kind of sacrilege in dissolving all these hallowed dogmas into thin air. Into

the bargain, he had done it in such a way that it only needed saying to carry

immediate conviction; so that the McLennanites, who had hitherto been

helplessly reeling to and fro between exogamy and endogamy, could only beat

their brows and exclaim: “How could we be such fools as not to think of

that for ourselves long ago?”

As if these crimes had not already left the official school with the option

only of coldly ignoring him, Morgan filled the measure to overflowing by not

merely criticizing civilization, the society of commodity production, the basic

form of present-day society, in a manner reminiscent of Fourier, but also by

speaking of a future transformation of this society in words which Karl Marx

might have used. He had therefore amply merited McLennan’s indignant

reproach that “the historical method is antipathetical to Mr.

Morgan’s mind,” and its echo as late as 1884 from Mr. Professor

Giraud-Teulon of Geneva. In 1874 (Origines de la Famille) this same

gentleman was still groping helplessly in the maze of the McLennanite exogamy,

from which Morgan had to come and rescue him!

Of the other advances which primitive anthropology owes to Morgan, I do not

need to speak here; they are sufficiently discussed in the course of this

study. The fourteen years which have elapsed since the publication of his chief

work have greatly enriched the material available for the study of the history

of primitive human societies. The anthropologists, travelers and primitive

historians by profession have now been joined by the comparative jurists, who

have contributed either new material or new points of view. As a result, some

of Morgan’s minor hypotheses have been shaken or even disproved. But not

one of the great leading ideas of his work has been ousted by this new

material. The order which he introduced into primitive history still holds in

its main lines today. It is, in fact, winning recognition to the same degree in

which Morgan’s responsibility for the great advance is carefully

concealed. [1]

Frederick Engels

London, June 16, 1891