the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Notes to Introduction, pp. 7-8.centric naivete is discounted. Bachofen’s Versuch über die Gräbersymbolikder Alten, 1859, develops an idea that has a bearing on thecontemporary study of the myth as an external manifestation: Themyth is the exegesis of the symbol, unfolding in a series of actionsexternally connected that which the symbol bears as a unity withinitself. The nature of the symbol should be re-examined in this connectionas well.The question of how Morgan gained access to Bachofen’s Mutterrecht,since he knew no German, remains. See L. Krader in: AmericanAnthropologist, v. 72, 1970, pp. 108-109.18 Chronik, pp. 104-105.19 Engels, op. cit., p. 27. Morgan wrote, “The family represents anactive principle ... Systems of consanguinity... are passive; recordingthe progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and onlychanging radically when the family has changed radically.” (AncientSociety, p. 444.) Marx commented on this passage (ms. notes p. 10),“ Ebenso verhält es sich mit politischen, religiösen, juristischen,philosophischen Systemen überhaupt.” Engels reported both thesestatements and carried the idea further, introducing the analogy ofsociety to the organic world: “ ... Just as Cuvier could deduce fromthe marsupial bone of an animal skeleton ... that it belonged to amarsupial animal ... so with the same certainty we can deduce fromthe historical survival of a system of consanguinity that an extinctform of family once existed which corresponded to it.” (Engels, I.e.)The German of Engels reads: “Mit derselben Sicherheit aber, mit derCuvier ... schliessen konnte__ ” (MEW 21, p. 38). Engels consideredthat Morgan’s and his own method of reconstruction proceededwith the same certainty, or assuredness, as that of Cuvier; his formulationin German is definitive in positing the given preciseness of thebiologist’s and the ethnologist’s method.Marx’s formulation relates to social institutions without commitmentto an organicist model in its methodology, or even a metaphoricconstruction upon an organic model. Morgan, to be sure, hada general connection to an organicist conception of human society,bearing certain similarities to that of Herbert Spencer; Durkheim, ageneration later, was not able to rid himself entirely of the charge ofan organicist social theory of collective representations. Marx didnot espouse the organicist view in this context, and rejected it inreference to Hegel’s theory of society (cf. Grundrisse, op. cit., Einleitungpassim). Marx’s opinion was that Cuvier, while the best ofgeologists, expounded certain facts “in a completely distorted way.”(“ ... Wie die Geologen gewisse facts, selbst die besten, wie Cuvier,ganz verkehrt ausgelegt...... ” Letter of March 25, 1868, MEW 32,p. 52.) On Cuvier’s opposition to evolution and Darwinism, cf.A. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology, (1896)i960, v. 1, pp. 63-64.364