The Origin of the Family: Private Property and the State [Paperback]

Friedrich Engels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2001

“An eternal being created human society as it is today, and submission to ‘superiors’ and ‘authority’ is imposed on the ‘lower’ classes by divine will.” This suggestion, coming from the pulpit, platform and press, has hypnotized the minds of men and proves to be one of the strongest pillars of exploitation.

The history of the family dates from 1861, the year of the publication of Bachofen’s “Mutterrecht” (maternal law) Engles makes the following propositions:

1. That in the beginning people lived in unrestricted sexual intercourse, which he dubs, not very felicitously, hetaerism.

2. That such an intercourse excludes any absolutely certain means of determining parentage; that consequently descent could only be traced by the female line in compliance with maternal law – and that this was universally practiced by all the nations of antiquity.

3. That consequently women as mothers, being the only well known parents of younger generations, received a high tribute of respect and deference, amounting to a complete women’s rule (gynaicocracy), according to Bachofen’s idea.

4. That the transition to monogamy, reserving a certain woman exclusively to one man, implied the violation of the primeval religious law (i.e., practically a violation of the customary right of all other men to the same woman), which violation had to be atoned for its permission purchased by the surrender of the women to the public for a limited time.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was the author of The Condition of the Working Class in England and collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto and Capital.

Tristram Hunt, one of Britain's best-known young historians, is a lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Univ Pr of the Pacific (July 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0898754690
• ISBN-13: 978-0898754698
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 4.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,480,578 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A political classic, August 10, 2010

By 

Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall "Dr Stuart Jeanne B... (New Plymouth, New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

I have always found Engels easier to decipher than Marx. Also, since much of this book is based on the new (in 1884) science of anthropology - a close cousin to psychology and psychiatry - I generally find it pretty easy to get my head around the concepts that he presents.

It stands out really clearly in this book that he and Marx trace the origins of class society to the agricultural revolution (when human beings started raising crops and animals instead of being hunter gatherers) - which immediately resulted in a "surplus" of food - which became the responsibility of an elite (chieftains and priests) to safeguard for the winter and hard times.

He also traces the necessity for men to trace their offspring once there is a surplus and they begin to accumulate wealth (the keepers of the surplus get to keep a little more of it than everyone else). Because by this time human beings have figured out how babies are made and want to bequeath their wealth to their descendents. This can only happen if they can trace their paternity, which means limiting women (but not men) to a single sexual partner. Thus the need to replace matriarchal society with patriarchy and to introduce the marriage contract to bind women to a single man.

Engels then traces how this primitive "tribal" structure, eventually led to the concept of private property - and of the feudalistic state. To have a state you have to have a king or supreme leader. He maintains power via a standing army and rewards "knights" in his army with gifts of private property. And because property is no longer owned communally, people are forced off the land they used to farm and have no choice but to go and work as serfs for the knights and lords who now own the property by the king's decree.

The book contains a fascinating section about the way the Iroquois Nation governed themselves - including their use of consensus in decision making, inheritance through the female line and their collective ownership of property. He also outlines how various Iroquois tribes were united in a Confederacy governed by a Federal Council (which formed the basis for state-federal structure the colonists adopted in the US Constitution).

The section about democracy in ancient Athens and the coalescence of Latin tribes into a single Roman government is also extremely interesting. The final section concerns the amalgamation of the various Germanic tribes into the states of Germany and France.

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE.

regard for all members of the tribe as having an equal voice (with men and women playing an equal role in leadership), , insistence on consensus decision making, their

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Engels would be displeased, March 27, 2010

By 

Benjamin C. Paulson "Ben" (Saint Louis, MO, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Paperback)

I like this book, of course. However, Amazon's "Print on Demand" leaves the buyer with a text that is almost incomplete. I guess I was warned, but I did not expect paragraphs of material lost due to the accuracy of the photograph. I could have rated this item five stars simply for the content of the book, however, the mistakes and unreadable content in the book would not allow me to rate it so high.

Here is an example of the mistakes in the text, in case someone is curious:

"1. The consanguine family. The co nganguine familv is th e first step toward the famtl. Heie the niarriage groups. are-arranged by generations: all the grand-fathers and grand-mothers T nt"BTir a certain famijylare. mutual husbands and 5 3 51?? J-the."

As you can see, these mistakes render the text less than intelligible. The frequency of occurrence seemed to be about once a page, with some excerpts worse (harder to understand) than others. There are a few pages that are full of this gibberish, and I was not able to read them. Nevertheless, this book is not common, and it is good to have my own copy (for cheap), albeit slightly incomplete.

5.0 out of 5 stars communism and feminism, January 19, 2011

By 

Samuel W. Rose - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

This book by Engels, though flawed by modern standards, is a great text for its time. It connects the development of the modern family and the subsequent oppression of women as intimately linked to the development of capitalism. The flaws in this text come from his use of Lewis Henry Morgan and the problematic notion of a universal and linear evolution of human society. Though that has found to be anthropologically incorrect, the true value of this text and its contribution to socialist and communist thought lies in the aforementioned connection between the oppression of women and the emergence of capitalism.