the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

tions wrought in the capitalist epoch on mankind, and as a means toovercome the latter. With the exception of Morgan, whose limitationswill be discussed below, none of the evolutionary school of that periodwrote with any relevancy to the theme of the deformation of man’scharacter by civilization, a theme later taken up by Sigmund Freud.The Comtean positivists, in the generation before Darwin, made acult of the progress of mankind, a doctrine which was not specificallysloughed off by the Darwinians despite Darwin’s generally anti-teleologicaldirection.2 The conceptions of T. H. Huxley, Lubbock, Maine,Morgan, Phear, Kovalevsky, in this regard were limited in that they hadno way to translate the mechanisms of selection for survival from theorder of nature to the order of culture. Marx questioned the doctrine ofthe social organism because it was related to no particular and concretebody of scientific data, on the one hand, and as the basis for unguidedprogress, was related to no particular human act on the other. Progressis located outside the human sphere, according to this set of doctrines,not only because of the lack of scientific data and theories; the relationof progress to the human sphere was not worked out, in part because theplace of culture in the order of nature was not developed by those writers.The distinction made between the workings of providence and of progressby J. B. Bury and others is superficially attractive because divine agencyis asserted in the former case but not in the latter.3 Progress as thereconceived is, however, unrelated to anything that man does or knows:the general disposition to progress lies as much outside human control,as it is conceived by these thinkers in the twentieth century, as it did inthe nineteenth, and as did the action of providence in the seventeenth.Progress is brought to the order of nature by man’s abstract conception,just as providence is brought to it by his mystical conception; the abstractionis found in the mystical and the mystical in the abstract orders,neither progress nor providence being directly connected with the actualprocesses of nature.Marx developed a series of positions in philosophical anthropologyduring the years 1841-1846. Those having particular relevance to theethnological notebooks are in regard to the interrelations of the family,civil society and the State (in the Critique o f the Hegelian Philosophy o fRight)', the alienation of man in society and in nature (in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts') ; the doctrine of man producing himself by hislabor and by his relations in society (in the German Ideology and the HolyFamily); and the opposition of the concretion to the abstraction of man(in the Theses on Feuerbach).4 The increasingly concrete problems taken upin his work, his revolutionary activities during the 1848 period and hisconclusion that the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in politicaleconomy5 transformed his treatment of anthropology from a philosophicalto an empirical subject. His research at the British Museum then4