the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

later, of Lubbock.15 The sets of excerpts taken from Morgan, Phear,Maine and Lubbock will form the domain of our inquiry, consideringalso that Kovalevsky’s work on Communal Landownership, which Marxexcerpted in 1879, is also apposite both in its contents and in its closechronological relation to the later materials.16 The excerpts taken fromMorgan, Phear and Maine, together with those from Money, Sohm andHospitalier, form the contents of one notebook (see note 15); the Lubbockexcerpts are found in a second. The relations of the contents of thesenotebooks both to each other and to Marx’s other works will be discussedin the following pages; a special addendum on the chronology of thenotebooks will be found at the end of this Introduction.In view of Marx’s extensive and ongoing work on the ethnologicalliterature at that time we infer that if he had intended to present theresults of his researches, of which those on Morgan were the most influential,then it was in connection with this and other ethnographic andhistorical matter from those authors mentioned, as well as from Bancroft,Tylor, Bachofen, Niebuhr, Grote, Mommsen, and such others as werecited in the notebooks.17 (On the juxtaposition of these materials tothose on colonial questions and on technology of agriculture, see theparagraph following and note 15.) How Marx had intended to presenthis work, whether as a book on an ethnological subject, or as a part ofa work on another subject is unclear; his work cannot be said to havetaken a particular form, it was rather in the process of gestation. As tocontent, on the other hand, his views on Morgan, Maine, and othercontemporary authors, on the current state of ethnology, on socialevolution, prehistory and history of antiquity, on historical and evolutionaryfatalism and necessitarianism, have been known until now onlyin outline from his correspondence and from citations drawn from theexcerpt notebook on Morgan and incorporated in Engels’ Origin o f theFamily. We now have the context of those citations, together withother comments by Marx, and the materials from the remaining authors.The notebook containing the excerpts from the books of Morgan,Phear and Maine also contains excerpts from Money’s book on Java asa colony (see n. 15); the Lubbock excerpt is followed directly by notestaken from an article on Egyptian finance; the brief excerpt fromHospitalier may be connected with an interest as early as April-May 1851in the application of electricity to increasing the fertility of the soil, anidea he had taken from the Economist of London.18 The notebooks arenot to be regarded as fortuitous agglomerations; they stand as nodalpoints in which ideas related to each other were explored in variousstudies, perhaps not as lines of association in general, but in particular.Starting from the study of primitive society, they lead to the evolutionof society and, to judge by their juxtaposition, to the problems of colonialismand technological progress in agriculture. While the focus of7