the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

still, after the institution of gentes; this sequence is vital to the comprehensionof Ancient Society. L. White has criticized Morgan for having,despite information then available to him, put Polynesia too low on thesocial scale. Morgan was forming, but had not fully developed, an ideathat the several families of peoples, each with a common origin, history,society, culture and language had peopled the continents or island worlds.The idea was worked out only for America: the evidence of the unity oforigin of the American Indians, or the Ganowanian family, was provedbeyond reasonable doubt to him; the Eskimos were excluded from thisorigin. The Turanian family of peoples of Asia is referred to in the sameterms by Morgan as the Ganowanian, but without further specificationas to its composition. This culture geography and culture history wasconsidered apart from the systems of consanguinity and affinity, althoughthe one was applied as a characterizing feature in the nomenclature ofgeneral identification of the inhabitants of continents.Morgan’s materialism on the one side and his relations to Darwinismon the other have been much discussed. The general periodization appliedby Morgan was, in its conception, material or technological to be sure;yet he conceived that the social institutions evolved out of the germs ofthought of the human species, which is the opposite of any sense ofmaterialism. On the other hand, he wrote of the succession of increasinglyhigher organizations as the result of ‘great social movements worked outunconsciously through natural selection.’ Morgan had not worked outin his own mind a system of natural philosophy, but the various elementsof one are there to be found, propounded with a deep conviction.20According to Morgan, government in primitive societies is personaland founded upon relations that are personal. Marx, on the other hand,implicitly controverted this in his Maine manuscript. Maine had writtenthat property in land has a twofold origin, partly from the disentanglementof the individual rights of the kinsmen or tribesmen from thecollective rights of the body of kin - Maine had written Family here -or tribe; and partly from the growth and transmutation of the sovereigntyof the chief. Marx responded to this: “Also nicht 2 fold origin; sondernnur 2 ramifications of the same source; the tribal property und tribalcollectivity which includes the tribal chief.” (See Maine excerpts, p. 164and n. 15 there.) It follows from this response of Marx that the relationsof property and government in primitive society are neither personal norimpersonal, but collective. Maine had criticized John Austin for positingthe existence of the State a priori, but, Marx wrote, Maine himself, inmaking this critique had failed to distinguish between the institution ofthe State and the person of the Prince: “Der unglückliche Maine selbsthat keine Ahnung davon, dass da wo Staaten existiren (after the primitiveCommunities, etc.) i.e. eine politisch organisirte Gesellschaft, der Staatkeineswegs der Prinz ist; er scheint nur so.” (Maine excerpts, p. 191.)9