the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

INTRODUCTIONThe ethnological writings of Lewis Henry Morgan, John Budd Phear,Henry Sumner Maine, and John Lubbock (Lord Avebury) were excerptedand critically reviewed by Karl Marx in the period 1880-1881-1882.A sense of unity may be derived from the juxtaposition of the namesof these writers on ethnology, as though they represented a commontradition; such a judgment would be contrary to fact, although theywere all uncritical evolutionists in England and America, active inthe 1870s. Marx studied a number of other works in ethnology and culturehistory in addition to these, in particular those of Georg L. Maurerand Maxim M. Kovalevsky. Morgan put together an account of theevolution of human society than which none was more coherent in itstime; Maine was then the leading English figure in comparative andhistorical jurisprudence; Phear and Kovalevsky were both attracted tohis doctrines, Phear on the Oriental side; Lubbock was one of the bestknownDarwinians of that period.Marx left his notes in the state in which they are published here, hiswork cut short by his death in 1883. Friedrich Engels took up Marx’snotes on Morgan in connection with his own book, D er Ursprung derFamilie, des Privateigentums und des Staats. This portion of the materialswas then discussed by Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and HeinrichCunow, as those associated with the German Social Democracy at theend of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, particularlyin its organ, D ie Neue Z eit.The body of Marx’s excerpt notebooks containing his studies inethnology of this time was not surveyed until the following generation.D. Ryazanov, the editor of the historical-critical edition of the collectedworks of Marx and Engels, gave a brief account of them, with the exceptionof the Phear materials, in a lecture before the Socialist Academy inMoscow, November 20, 1923, and published in the Vestnik SotsialisticheskoyAkadem ii, in the same year; it was then brought out, under theeditorship of Carl Griinberg, in the Archiv fu r die Geschichte des So^ialismusin 1925. A Russian version of the Morgan manuscript alone, with significantchanges, was published in the A rkhiv of the Marx-Engels Institute1941, on the basis of photocopies of the original made by Ryazanov.These excerpt notebooks were again surveyed, by E. Lucas in 1964, nowincluding the Phear manuscript; the Morgan manuscript materials of1