the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

Notes to Introduction, p. 77.coming publication, “ Ursprung der Familie, des Eigentums und desStaats” , (not the definitive title)Table of Contents of Ursprung follows:Ch. I. Vorgeschichtliche Kulturstufen1. Wildheit2. BarbareiII. Die Familie1. Die Blutverwandtschaftsfamilie2. Die Punaluafamilie3. Die Paarungsfamilie4. Die monogame FamilieIII. Die irokesische GensIV. Die griechische GensV. Entstehung des athenischen StaatsVI. Gens und Staat in RomVII. Die Gens bei Kelten und DeutschenVIII. Die Staatsbildung der DeutschenIX. Barbarei und ZivilisationThe sequence of the chapters here reflects Marx’s rearrangementof Morgan’s order, ch. II, Family, preceding the chapters on theGens and the State. Property in Engels has no special chapter or partdevoted to it, nor has intelligence (see above, n. 21). The mostimportant topic, in length, is that of the family; the chapter in whichit is treated occupies more than one-third of the entire work; comparethe proportionate space that Morgan and Marx gave to the topic(cf. n. 21). Because of the difference in the manner of treatment ofthe various topics and their internal breakdown, further comparisonis idle.148 Ibid., p. 19. Cf. V. Gordon Childe, Social Evolution, 1951, pp. 6 ff.:Childe considered that Morgan’s and Engels’ account of the severalstages of ‘economic, political and kinship organization is untenablein detail’, ‘but remains the best of its kind.’ Childe was conscious ofthe expansion of the materials from Morgan’s day, but was attractedby the underlying idea of social evolution at uneven rates, that is, ofperiods of rapid change (revolutions in Childe’s terms), followed byperiods of stability. He retained Morgan’s three-stage framework,therefore, but proposed new criteria for the stages. The chapter inMorgan, Ratio of Human Progress, is most open to Childe’s criticism.That chapter, however, includes a statement by Morgan, in whichboth a unilinear and multilinear approach to the problem of humanevolution is adumbrated, bearing out the subtitle of his work, for hewrote of reascending the several lines of human progress (AncientSociety, pp. 4, 29). Sahlins has taken up this problem again in relationto the work of Darwin, Tylor, Morgan, and Spencer (M. Sahlins andE. Service, Evolution and Culture, 1959), but not particularly in Mor­390