the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

and interdependent institutional complexes that work together in allsocial systems. Our paradigmatic specimens exemplify this over awide range of phenotypically diverse societies.... Variations indemographic scale, economic complexity, and politico-jural differentiationregulate the ways in which these complexes are manifestedand interlinked.... Where there is society, there is both kinship andpolity, both status and contract. What is distinctive is their relativeelaboration, their relative weight and scope in different sectors ofsocial life.108But if the relatively higher degree of political elaboration occurs later intime, and if there is a relatively lesser weight and scope of kinship as therelations of civitas are built up, then Morgan cannot be said to have argueddifferently. Fortes, save for a stylistic change, is close to the synchronicaspect of Morgan; V. G. Childe, while retaining Morgan’s terminology,departed from the substance of Morgan’s temporal sequence, therebyfollowing out Engels’ line of thought. L. A. White has proceeded moredirectly along Morgan’s line, independently of these. The developmentand transformation of social institutions, among them the gentile,property and territorial, which were posited by Morgan, Genossenschaftby Gierke, status by Maine and F. Toennies, association and communityby Maclver and Lowie accomplished the transition of man to the formof society having the State among its institutions. The common featureof the writers in this tradition is that the State is established primarilyas a relation between men, secondarily as a relation between man andnature. Both sides have proceeded in their examination without seekingthe interrelation between the social and the natural relations of man.The diachronic analysis of the given social institutions sets forth howthe formation of the state is concretely determined as the rrieans bothto social integration and to social opposition. Alternatively, we fallback upon a subjective organicism of the Hegelian right wing as aninterpretation of the origin of the State, wherein it is conceived ashaving grown without indicating how the growth has taken place, thesubjectivity here being conceived wholly as an abstraction.The stages of human progress were conceived in part by Morgan asbenchmarks, and Opler has understood him in this way. Fortes for hisown purposes has interpreted Morgan’s diachrony solely as a mode ofexplanation. These are partial because onesided interpretations of Morganwho, at the same time posited an organic series from gens to tribeand from societas to civitas as objectively real, as the active means of humanprogress, proper and internal to it, and not merely as its external measureor explanation. Morgan thereby made explicit that which had beenimplicit in the writings of Vico and Ferguson. Morgan’s theory ofevolution was a part of the conception of ethnology as a natural science,which was widely held in his time, but foreign to most contemporary52