{"agent_id":"engels","agent_name":"Friedrich Engels","slug":"the-origin-of-the-family-private-property-and-the-state","label":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: did the patriarchal family arise with private property, and does the state derive from class antagonisms?","topic":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State","question":"Did the patriarchal family arise with private property, and does the state derive from class antagonisms?","position":"The patriarchal monogamous family arose with the development of inheritable private property, particularly in the form of wealth that required certainty of paternity. Women's oppression in the bourgeois family form is rooted in the historical conjunction of private property and male-line inheritance — it is not a transhistorical fact about the sexes. The state derives historically from class antagonisms; it is the form in which one class organizes its rule over another. With the abolition of class antagonisms the state will *wither away*, returning the social functions it has appropriated to associated production. Morgan's specific anthropological framework has been substantially revised since 1877, but the central claims about the historical character of the family and the class derivation of the state survive the revisions.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The patriarchal monogamous family arose with the development of inheritable private property, particularly in the form of wealth that required certainty of paternity.","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"Women's oppression in the bourgeois family form is rooted in the historical conjunction of private property and male-line inheritance — it is not a transhistorical fact about the sexes.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The state derives historically from class antagonisms; it is the form in which one class organizes its rule over another.","n":[]},{"t":"With the abolition of class antagonisms the state will *wither away*, returning the social functions it has appropriated to associated production.","n":[]},{"t":"Morgan's specific anthropological framework has been substantially revised since 1877, but the central claims about the historical character of the family and the class derivation of the state survive the revisions.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"*The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* (1884; revised 1891 preface); Marx's notes on Lewis Henry Morgan's *Ancient Society* (1881–82, the \"Ethnological Notebooks\"); *Anti-Dühring* (1877–78), the family chapter. Reception: Lewis Henry Morgan (*Ancient Society* 1877, the source); J.J. Bachofen (*Mother Right* 1861, the matriarchy thesis); August Bebel (*Woman and Socialism* 1879); Heidi Hartmann (\"The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism\" 1979); Maria Mies (*Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale* 1986); Lise Vogel (*Marxism and the Oppression of Women* 1983); Gerda Lerner (*The Creation of Patriarchy* 1986); Mikhail Bakunin (*Statism and Anarchy* 1873, the anarchist objection to the state-derivation argument).","works":["*The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* (1884","revised 1891 preface)","Marx's notes on Lewis Henry Morgan's *Ancient Society* (1881–82, the \"Ethnological Notebooks\")","*Anti-Dühring* (1877–78), the family chapter"],"reception":"Lewis Henry Morgan (*Ancient Society* 1877, the source); J.J. Bachofen (*Mother Right* 1861, the matriarchy thesis); August Bebel (*Woman and Socialism* 1879); Heidi Hartmann (\"The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism\" 1979); Maria Mies (*Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale* 1986); Lise Vogel (*Marxism and the Oppression of Women* 1983); Gerda Lerner (*The Creation of Patriarchy* 1986); Mikhail Bakunin (*Statism and Anarchy* 1873, the anarchist objection to the state-derivation argument).","status":"Composed in the months after Marx's death from his unfinished notes on Morgan's *Ancient Society* (the \"Ethnological Notebooks\"). I revised the work in the 1891 preface to incorporate later anthropology. The political analysis has been extended by 20th-century socialist feminism (Hartmann, Mies, Vogel) where the underlying anthropology has been corrected. I have not retreated from the central claims under post-Morganian anthropological criticism.","era":"1820-1895","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State","page":"pp. 156–158","canonical":"","quote":"But what will quite certainly disappear from monogamy are all the features stamped upon it through its origin in property relations; these are, in the ɹrst place, supremacy of the man and secondly, the indissolubility of marriage. The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself.","label":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 156–158"},{"n":2,"work":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State","page":"pp. 133–134","canonical":"","quote":"It was the ɹrst form of the family to be based not on natural but on economic conditions - on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property. The Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own.","label":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 133–134"},{"n":3,"work":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State","page":"pp. 158–160","canonical":"","quote":"How monogamy fares during this epoch, therefore, only occupies him very brieɻy. He, too, sees in the further development of the monogamous family a step forward, an approach to complete equality of the sexes, though he does not regard this goal as attained.","label":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 158–160"},{"n":4,"work":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"And just as \"Capital\" was zealously plagiarized and persistently passed over in silence by the professional economists in Germany, so Morgan's \"Ancient Society\" was treated by the spokesmen of \"prehistoric\" science in England. My work can offer only a meager substitute for that which my departed friend was not destined to accomplish.","label":"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"dialectical-materialism-and-the-dialectics-of-nature","label":"Dialectical materialism and the dialectics of nature: does the dialectical method apply beyond human society to natural science?"},{"slug":"scientific-socialism-vs-utopian-socialism","label":"Scientific socialism vs. utopian socialism: what makes a socialist analysis 'scientific' rather than utopian?"},{"slug":"the-condition-of-the-working-class-in-england","label":"The Condition of the Working Class in England: was the empirical sociology sound, or was the evidence selected to fit a political conclusion?"},{"slug":"editorial-fidelity-to-marx","label":"Editorial fidelity to Marx: did the editorial labor on Capital II/III, the 1895 Introduction, and the retrospective formulations distort or faithfully transmit Marx's work?"}]}