Origin of
Family, Property and State
The previous post introduced Chapter
32 of Karl Marx’s “Capital”, Volume 1. It is typically sweeping
overview of history, placed at the end of Marx's long book as a summary, and
the one before that was from “The Prince”, by Machiavelli.
Both Machiavelli and Marx, were familiar with the history of
“the ancients”, and especially with the literature of the Greeks and the
Romans. These ancients often wrote in similarly sweeping terms. They were
humanists and generalists and not narrow-minded specialists. They were
philosophers in the broad sense of the word: people who sought wisdom of all
kinds, and the essence of wisdom itself.
With today's item, and once again to support the kind of
historical view that Machiavelli brought back into modern historiography, and
into literature, we have Chapter 9 of Frederick Engels’ “The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (download linked
below).
We will return to “The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State” later in this Basics course when we are dealing more
specifically with the State, and we will return to it again when we deal with
the set called “No
Woman, No Revolution”. This is because the rise of property, and the
State that secured property, was also at one and the same time the cause of the
fall of the women in human society.
Please ignore the first three paragraphs of
today’s given chapter. These paragraphs only refer back to earlier chapters in
the book. But from then onwards what you will find is a short history of human
society from its beginning right up to modern times.
In the literature of Marx and Engels, as in the literature of
the ancient Greeks and Romans, and as in Machiavelli, there is a constant sense
of history on a grand scale, or what is sometimes called a “grand narrative” of
human life - which is then projected into the future.
Engels was a pioneer in the field of prehistory (the study
of the time during the development of human culture before the appearance of
the written word), as he was in many other fields of learning. His ideas on
prehistory, based also on work done by Henry
Morgan and then by Karl Marx, have stood the test of time.
Marx had recently died when Engels wrote this book. Hence the
book is also to some extent a tribute to Marx from Engels.
Please download and read the text via the
following link:
Further reading:
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