The previous large editions of this work have been out of print 
now for almost six months and the publisher* has for some time 
past desired me to prepare a new edition. More urgent tasks have 
hitherto prevented me from doing so. Seven years have elapsed 
since the first edition appeared, and during this period our 
knowledge of the primitive forms of the family has made 
important progress. It was, therefore, necessary diligently to apply 
the hand to the work of amplification and improvement, 
particularly in view of the fact that the proposed placing of the 
present text on stereotypes will make further changes on my part 
impossible for some time to come. 

I have, therefore, submitted the whole text to a careful revision, 
and have made a number of additions, in which, I hope, due 
regard has been paid to the present state of science. Further, in 
the course of this preface, I give a brief review of the development 
of the history of the family from Bachofen to Morgan, principally 
because the English prehistoric school, which is tinged with 
chauvinism, continues to do its utmost to kill by silence the 
revolution Morgan’s discoveries have made in conceptions of the 
history of primitive society, although it does not hesitate in the 

least to appropriate his results. Elsewhere, too, this English 
example is followed only too often. 

My work has been translated into various languages. First into 
Italian: L’origine della famiglia, della proprieta privata e dello stato. 
Versione riveduta dall’autore, di Pasquale Martignetti. Benevento, 
1885. Then Rumanian: Originea familiei, proprietatu, private si a 
statului. Traducere de Joan Nadejde, in the Yassy periodical 
Contemporanul, September 1885 to May 1886. Further into Danish: 
Familjens, Privatejendommens og Statens Oprindelse. Dansk af Forfatte- 
ren gennemgaaet Udgave, besgrget af Gerson Trier, Copenhagen, 
1888. A French translation by Henri Ravé based on the present 
German edition is in the press.’ 

Until the beginning of the sixties there was no such thing as a 
history of the family. In this sphere historical science was still 
completely under the influence of the Five Books of Moses. The 
patriarchal form of the family, described there in greater detail than 
anywhere else, was not only implicitly accepted as the oldest form of 
the family, but also—after excluding polygamy — identified with the 
present-day bourgeois family, as if the family had really undergone 
no historical development at all. At most it was admitted that a 
period of promiscuous sexual relationships might have existed in 
primeval times.— To be sure, in addition to monogamy, Oriental 
polygamy and Indo-Tibetan polyandry were also known, but these 
three forms could not be arranged in any historical sequence and 
appeared disconnectedly alongside of each other. That among 
certain peoples of ancient times, and among some still existing 
savages, the line of descent was reckoned not from the father but 
from the mother and, therefore, the female lineage alone was 
regarded as valid; that among many peoples of today marriage 
within definite larger groups—not subjected to closer investigation 
at that time—is prohibited, and that this custom is to be met with in 
all parts of the world—these facts were indeed known and new 
examples were constantly being brought to light. But nobody knew 
what to do with them, and even in E. B. Tylor’s Researches into the 
Early History of Mankind, etc. etc. (1865), they figure merely as 
“strange customs” along with the taboo in force among some savages 

against the touching of burning wood with iron tools, and similar 
religious bosh and nonsense. 

The study of the history of the family dates from 1861, from the 
publication of Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht. In this work the author 
advances the following propositions: 1) that in the beginning 
humanity lived in a state of sexual promiscuity, which the author 
unhappily designates as hetaerism; 2) that such promiscuity 
excludes all certainty as regards paternity, that lineage, therefore, 
could be reckoned only through the female line—according to 
mother right—and that originally this was the case among all the 
peoples of antiquity; 3) that consequently women, who, as mothers, 
were the only definitely ascertainable parents of the younger 
generation, were treated with a high degree of consideration and 
respect, which, according to Bachofen’s conception, was enhanced to 
the complete rule of women (gynaecocracy); 4) that the transition to 
monogamy, where the woman belongs exclusively to one man, 
implied the violation of a primeval religious injunction (that is, in 
actual fact, the violation of the ancient traditional right of the other 
men to the same woman), a violation which had to be atoned for, or 
the toleration of which had to be purchased, by surrendering the 
woman for a limited period of time. 

Bachofen finds evidence in support of these propositions in 
countless passages of ancient classical literature, which he had 
assembled with extraordinary diligence. According to him, the 
evolution from “hetaerism” to monogamy, and from mother right to 
father right, takes place, particularly among the Greeks, as a 
consequence of the evolution of religious ideas, the intrusion of new 
deities, representatives of the new outlook, into the old traditional 
pantheon representing the old outlook, so that the latter is more and 
more driven into the background by the former. Thus, according to 
Bachofen, it is not the development of the actual conditions under 
which men live, but the religious reflection of these conditions of life 
in the minds of men that brought about the historical changes in the 
mutual social position of man and woman. Bachofen accordingly 
points to the Oresteia of Aeschylus as a dramatic depiction of the 
struggle between declining mother right and rising and victorious 
father right in the Heroic Age. Clytemnestra has slain her husband 
Agamemnon, just return from the Trojan War, for the sake of her 
lover Aegisthus; but Orestes, her son by Agamemnon, avenges his 
father’s murder by slaying his mother. For this he is pursued by the 
Erinyes, the demonic defenders of mother right, according to which 
matricide is the most heinous and inexpiable of crimes. But Apollo, 
who through his oracle has incited Orestes to commit this deed, and 

Athena, who is called in as arbiter—the two deities which here 
represent the new order, based on father right—protect him. 
Athena hears both sides. The whole controversy is_ briefly 
summarised in the debate which now ensues between Orestes and 
the Erinyes. Orestes declares that Clytemnestra is guilty of a double 
outrage; for in killing her husband she also killed his father. Why 
then have the Erinyes persecuted him and not Clytemnestra, who 1s 
much the greater culprit? The reply is striking: 

“Unrelated by blood was she to the man that she slew.” 4 

The murder of a man not related by blood, even though he be the 
husband of the murderess, is expiable and does not concern the 
Erinyes. Their function is to avenge only murders among 
blood-relatives, and the most heinous of all these, according to 
mother right, is matricide. Apollo now intervenes in defense of 
Orestes. Athena calls upon the Areopagites—the Athenian jurors — 
to vote on the question. The votes for acquittal and for the conviction 
are equal. Then Athena, as President of the Court, casts her vote in 
favour of Orestes and acquits him. Father right has gained the day 
over mother right. The “gods of junior lineage”, as they are 
described by the Erinyes themselves, are victorious over the Erinyes, 
and the latter allow themselves finally to be persuaded to assume a 
new office in the service of the new order. 

This new but absolutely correct interpretation of the Oresteia is 
one of the best and most beautiful passages in the whole book, but it 
shows at the same time that Bachofen himself believes in the Erinyes, 
Apollo and Athena at least as much as Aeschylus did in his day; he, in 
fact, believes that in the Heroic Age of Greece they performed the 
miracle of overthrowing mother right and replacing it by father 
right. Clearly, such a conception—which regards religion as the 
decisive lever in world history — must finally end in sheer mysticism. 
It is, therefore, an arduous and by no means always profitable task to 
wade through Bachofen’s bulky quarto volume. But all this does not 
detract from his merit as a pioneer, for he was the first to substitute 
for mere phrases about an unknown primitive condition of 
promiscuous sexual intercourse proof that ancient classical literature 
teems with traces of a condition that had in fact existed before 
monogamy among the Greeks and the Asiatics, in which not only a 
man had sexual intercourse with more than one woman, but a 
woman had sexual intercourse with more than one man, without 

violating the established custom; that this custom did not disappear 
without leaving traces in the form of the limited surrender by which 
women were compelled to purchase their right to monogamian 
marriage; that descent, therefore, could originally be reckoned only 
in the female line, from mother to mother, that this exclusive validity 
of the female line persisted far into the time of monogamy with 
assured, or at least recognised, paternity; and that this original 
position of the mother as the sole certain parent of her children 
assured her, and thus women in general, a higher social status than 
they have ever enjoyed since. Bachofen did not express these 
propositions as clearly as this—his mystical outlook prevented him 
from doing so; but he proved that they were correct, and this, in 
1861, meant a complete revolution. 

Bachofen’s bulky tome was written in German, that is, in the 
language of the nation which, at that time, interested itself less than 
any other in the prehistory of the present-day family. He, therefore, 
remained unknown. His immediate successor in this field appeared 
in 1865, without ever having heard of Bachofen. 

This successor was J. F. McLennan, the direct opposite of his 
predecessor. Instead of the talented mystic, we have here the 
dry-as-dust lawyer; instead of exuberant poetic fancy, we have the 
plausible arguments of the advocate pleading his case. McLennan 
finds among many savage, barbarian and even civilised peoples of 
ancient and modern times a form of marriage in which the 
bridegroom, alone or accompanied by friends, has to feign to carry 
off the bride from her relatives by force. This custom must be the 
survival of a previous custom, whereby the men of one tribe acquired 
their wives from outside, from other tribes, by actually abducting 
them by force. How then did this “marriage by abduction” 
originate? As long as men could find sufficient women in their own 
tribe there was no occasion for it whatsoever. But quite as often we 
find that among undeveloped peoples certain groups exist (which 
round about 1865 were still often identified with the tribes 
themselves) within which marriage is forbidden, so that the men are 
obliged to secure their wives, and the women their husbands, from 
outside the group; while among others the custom prevails that the 
men of a certain group are compelled to find their wives only within 
their own group. McLennan calls the first type of group exogamous, 
and the second endogamous, and without further ado establishes a 
rigid antithesis between exogamous and endogamous “tribes”. And 
although his own researches into exogamy bring under his very nose 
the fact that in many, if not most, or even all cases this antithesis 
exists only in his own imagination, he nevertheless makes it the 

foundation of his entire theory. Accordingly, exogamous tribes may 
procure their wives only from other tribes; and in the state of 
permanent intertribal warfare that is characteristic of savagery, this, 
he believes, could be done only by abduction. 

McLennan argues further: Whence this custom of exogamy? 
The conceptions of consanguinity and incest have nothing to do 
with it, for these are things which developed only much later. But 
the custom, widespread among savages, of killing female children 
immediately after birth, might. This custom created a superfluity 
of men in each individual tribe, the necessary and immediate 
sequel of which was the common possession of a woman by a 
number of men—polyandry. The consequence of this again was 
that the mother of a child was known, but the father was not, 
hence kinship was reckoned only in the female line to the 
exclusion of the male—mother right. And another consequence of 
the dearth of women within a tribe—a dearth mitigated but not 
overcome by polyandry—was precisely the systematic, forcible 
abduction of women of 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....2 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.) 

McLennan’s merit lies in having drawn attention to the general 
prevalence and great importance of what he terms exogamy. But 
he by no means discovered the existence of exogamous groups, and 
still less did he understand it. Apart from the earlier, isolated 
notes of many observers which served as McLennan’s sources, 
Latham (Descriptive Ethnology, 1859) exactly and correctly described 
this institution among the Indian Magars'” and declared that it 
was generally prevalent and existed in all parts of the world—a 
passage which McLennan himself quotes. And our Morgan, too, as 
far back as 1847, in his letters on the Iroquois (in the American 
Review), and in 1851 in The League of the Iroquois proved that it 
existed in this tribe, and described it correctly, whereas, as we shall 
see, McLennan’s lawyer mentality caused far greater confusion on 
this subject than Bachofen’s mystical fantasy did in the sphere of 
mother right. It is also to McLennan’s credit that he recognised 
the system of tracing descent through mothers as the original one, 
although, as he himself admitted later, Bachofen anticipated him 

in this. But here again he is far from clear; he speaks continually 
of “KINSHIP THROUGH FEMALES ONLY” and constantly applies this expres- 
sion—correct for an earlier stage—also to later stages of 
development, where, although descent and inheritance are still 
exclusively reckoned in the female line, kinship is also recognised 
and expressed in the male line. This is the restricted outlook of 
the jurist, who creates a rigid legal term for himself and continues 
to apply it without modification to conditions which in the 
meantime have rendered it inapplicable. 

In spite of its plausibility, McLennan’s theory evidently did not 
seem to be too well founded even to the author himself. At least, 
he himself is struck by the fact that 

* “it is observable that the form of” (mock) ‘“‘capture is now most distinctly 

marked and impressive just among those races which have male@ kinship” * 
(meaning descent through the male line) (p. 140). 

And, again: 

* “Tt 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” * (p. 146). 

Both these facts directly refute his interpretation, and he can 
oppose to them only new, still more intricate, hypotheses. 

Nevertheless, in England his theory met with great approbation 
and evoked great response. McLennan was generally accepted 
there as the founder of the history of the family, and the most 
eminent authority in this field. His antithesis between exogamous 
and endogamous “tribes”, notwithstanding the few exceptions and 
modifications admitted, remained nevertheless the recognised 
foundation of the prevailing view, and was the blinker which made 
any free survey of the field under investigation and, consequently, 
any definite progress, impossible. The overrating of McLennan, 
which became the vogue in England and, following the English 
fashion, elsewhere as well, makes it a duty to point out in contrast 
that the harm he caused with his completely erroneous antithesis 
between exogamous and endogamous “tribes” outweighs the good 
done by his researches. 

Meanwhile, more and more facts soon came to light, which did 
not fit into his neat scheme. McLennan knew only three forms of 
marriage— polygamy, polyandry and monogamy. But once atten- 
tion had been directed to this point, more and more proofs were 
discovered of the fact that among undeveloped peoples forms of 
marriage existed in which a group of men possessed a group of 

women in common; and Lubbock (The Origin of Civilisation, 1870) 
acknowledged this Communat Marriage to be a historical fact. 

Immediately after, in 1871, Morgan appeared with new and, in 
many respects, conclusive material. He had become convinced that 
the peculiar system of kinship prevailing among the Iroquois was 
common to all the aborigines of the United States and was thus 
spread over a whole continent, although it conflicted directly with 
the degrees of kinship actually arising from the connubial system 
in force there. He thereupon prevailed on the American Federal 
Government to collect information about the kinship systems of 
the other peoples, on the basis of questionnaires and tables drawn 
up by himself; and he discovered from the answers: 1) that the 
American Indian system of kinship prevailed also among numer- 
ous tribes in Asia, and, in a somewhat modified form, in Africa 
and Australia; 2) that it was completely explained by a form of 
group marriage, now approaching extinction, in Hawaii and in 
other Australian islands; and 3) that, however, alongside this 
marriage form, a system of kinship prevailed in these same islands 
which could only be explained by a still earlier but now extinct 
form of group marriage. He published the collected data and his 
conclusions from them in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity, 
1871, and thereby carried the discussion on to an infinitely wider 
field. Taking the systems of kinship as his starting-point, he 
reconstructed the forms of the family corresponding to them, and 
thereby opened up a new avenue of investigation and a more 
far-reaching retrospect into the prehistory of mankind. Were this 
method to be recognised as valid, McLennan’s neat construction 
would be resolved into thin air. 

McLennan defended his theory in a new edition of ‘Primitive 
Marriage” (Studies in Ancient History, 1876). While he himself very 
artificially constructs a history of the family out of sheer 
hypotheses, he demands of Lubbock and Morgan not only proofs 
for every one of their statements, but proofs of incontestable 
validity such as alone would be admitted in a Scottish court of law. 
And this is done by the man who, from the close relationship 
between one’s mother’s brother and one’s sister’s son among the 
Germans (Tacitus, Germania, c. 20), from Caesar’s report that the 
Britons in groups of ten or twelve possessed their wives in 
common,’ and from all the other reports of ancient writers 
concerning community of women among the barbarians, un- 
hesitatingly concludes that polyandry was the rule among all these 

peoples! It is like listening to counsel for the prosecution, who 
permits himself every license in preparing his own case, but 
demands the most formal and legally most valid proof for every 
word of counsel for the defence. 

Group marriage is a pure figment of the imagination, he asserts, 
and thus falls back far behind Bachofen. Morgan’s systems of 
kinship, he says, are nothing more than mere precepts on social 
politeness, proved by the fact that the Indians also address 
strangers, white men, as brother, or father. It is as if one were to 
argue that the terms father, mother, brother, sister are merely 
empty forms of address because Catholic priests and abbesses are 
likewise addressed as father and mother, and because monks and 
nuns, and even freemasons and members of English craft unions, 
in solemn session assembled, are addressed as brother and sister. 
In short, McLennan’s defence was miserably weak. 

One point, however, remained on which he had not been 
challenged. The antithesis between exogamous and endogamous 
“tribes” on which his whole system was founded not only 
remained unshaken, but was even generally accepted as the 
cornerstone of the entire history of the family. It was admitted 
that McLennan’s attempt to explain this antithesis was inadequate 
and contradicted the very facts he himself had enumerated. But 
the antithesis itself, the existence of two mutually exclusive types 
of separate and independent tribes, one of which took its wives 
from within the tribe, while this was absolutely forbidden to the 
other—this passed as incontrovertible gospel truth. Compare, for 
example, Giraud-Teulon’s Origines de la famille (1874) and even 
Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation (Fourth edition, 1882). 

This is the point at which Morgan’s chief work enters: Ancient 
Society (1877), the book upon which the present work is based. 
What Morgan only dimly surmised in 1871 is here developed with 
full comprehension. Endogamy and exogamy constitute no an- 
tithesis; up to the present no exogamous “tribes” have been 
brought to light anywhere. But at the time when group marriage 
still prevailed—and in all probability it existed everywhere at one 
time or other—the tribe consisted of a number of groups related 
by blood on the mother’s side, gentes, within which marriage was 
strictly prohibited, so that although the men of a gens could, and 
as a rule did, take their wives from within their tribe, they had, 
however, to take them from outside their gens. Thus, while the 
gens itself was strictly exogamous, the tribe, embracing all the 
gentes, was as strictly endogamous. With this, the last remnants of 
McLennan’s artificial structure definitely collapsed. 

Morgan, however, did not rest content with this. The gens of 
the American Indians served him further as a means of making 
the second decisive advance in the field of investigation he had 
entered upon. He discovered that the gens, organised according to 
mother right, was the original form out of which developed the 
later gens, organised according to father right, the gens as we find 
it among the civilised peoples of antiquity. The Greek and Roman 
gens, an enigma to all previous historians, was now explained by 
the Indian gens, and thus a new basis was found for the whole 
history of primitive society. 

The rediscovery of the original mother-right gens as the stage 
preliminary to the father-right gens of the civilised peoples has the 
same significance for the history of primitive society 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, wherein at least the classical 
stages of development are, on the whole, provisionally established, 
as far as the material at present available permits. Clearly, this 
opens a new era in the treatment of the history of primitive 
society. The mother-right gens has become the pivot around which 
this entire science turns; since its discovery we know in which 
direction to conduct our researches, what to investigate and how 
to classify the results of our investigations. As a consequence, 
progress in this field is now much more rapid than before 
Morgan’s book appeared. 

Morgan’s discoveries are now generally recognised, or rather 
appropriated, by prehistorians in England, too. But scarcely one of 
them will openly acknowledge that it is to Morgan that we owe this 
revolution in outlook. In England his book is hushed up as far as 
possible, and Morgan himself is dismissed with condescending 
praise for his previous work; the details of his exposition are 
eagerly picked on for criticism, while an obstinate silence reigns 
with regard to his really great discoveries. The original edition of 
Ancient Society is now out of print; in America there is no 
profitable market for books of this sort; in England, it would 
seem, the book was systematically suppressed, and the only edition 
of this epoch-making work still available in the book trade is—the 
German translation. 

Whence this reserve, which it is difficult not to regard as a 
conspiracy of silence, particularly in view of the host of quotations 
given merely for politeness’ sake and of other evidences of 
camaraderie, in which the writings of our recognised prehistorians 
abound? Is it perhaps because Morgan is an American, and it is 

very hard for English prehistorians, despite their highly com- 
mendable diligence in the collection of material, to have to depend 
for the general viewpoint which determines the arrangement and 
grouping of this material, in short, for their ideas, upon two 
talented foreigners—Bachofen and Morgan? A German might be 
tolerated, but an American? Every Englishman waxes patriotic 
when faced with an American, amusing examples of which I have 
come across while I was in the United States.'”? To this must be 
-added that McLennan was, so to speak, the officially proclaimed 
founder and leader of the English prehistoric school; that it was, 
in a sense, good form among prehistorians to refer only with the 
greatest reverence to his artificially constructed historical theory 
leading from infanticide, through polyandry and marriage by 
abduction, to the mother-right family; that the slightest doubt cast 
upon the existence of mutually wholly exclusive exogamous and 
endogamous “tribes” was regarded as rank heresy; so that 
Morgan, in thus resolving all these hallowed dogmas into thin air, 
was guilty of a kind of sacrilege. Moreover, he resolved them in 
such a way that he had only to state his case for it to become 
obvious at once; and the McLennan worshippers, hitherto 
confusedly staggering about between exogamy and endogamy, 
were almost driven to beating their foreheads and exclaiming: 
How could we have been so stupid as not to have discovered all 
this for ourselves long ago! 

And, as though this were not crime enough to prohibit the 
official school from treating him with anything else but cold 
indifference, Morgan filled the cup to overflowing not only by 
criticising civilisation, the society of commodity production, the 
basic form of our present-day society, after a fashion reminiscent 
of Fourier, but also by speaking of a future transformation of 
society in words which Karl Marx might have used. He received 
his deserts, therefore, when McLennan indignantly charged him 
with having “a profound antipathy to the historical method”’,* and 
when Professor Giraud-Teulon endorsed this view in Geneva as 
late as 1884. Was it not this same M. Giraud-Teulon, who, in 1874 
(Origines de la famille), was still wandering helplessly in the maze 
of McLennan’s exogamy, from which it took Morgan to liberate 
him? 

It is not necessary for me to deal here with the other advances 
which the history of primitive society owes to Morgan; a reference 
to what is needed will be found in the course of this book. During 

the fourteen years that have elapsed since the publication of his 
chief work our material relating to the history of primitive human 
societies has been greatly augmented. In addition to anthropolo- 
gists, travellers and professional prehistorians, students of compara- 
tive law have taken the field and have contributed new material 
and new points of view. As a consequence, some of Morgan’s 
hypotheses pertaining to particular points have been shaken, or 
eyen become untenable. But nowhere have the newly-collected 
data led to the supplanting of his principal conceptions by others. 
In its main features, the order he introduced into the study of the 
history of primitive society holds good to this day. We can even 
say that it is finding increasingly general acceptance in the same 
measure as his authorship of this great advance is being 
concealed.* 

London, June 16, 1891 
Frederick Engels