the ethnological notebooks of karl marx - Marxists Internet Archive

anarchic individualism and the left-wing Hegelian direction to the causeof the people, John Stuart Mill who linked the individualism of Benthamto social reformism and to the collectivism of Auguste Comte, playedambiguous roles. The doctrine of individualism of Herbert Spencer, inwhich the last flicker of the social contract was detected by Ernest Barker,returned the polarizing tendency of the epoch to its normal course; at thesame time Spencer wrote of the social organism as a collective entity, ashad Comte before him. Spencer did not resolve this internal contradictionto his individualist doctrine.Opposed to the internationalist and socialist collectivism was thenotion which was developed in the romanticism of the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries, of the origin of the nation out of particularcollectivist institutions and traditions. The separation of civil from politicalsociety in the Hegelian doctrine was taken as the juncture from whichthe two subsequent traditions of collectivity separated : the Hegelian rightbrought out the collectivity as the womb of the nation, the Hegelian leftbrought out the collectivity as the womb of all mankind. The Slavophiles,Russian conservatives, arose out of the nationalist doctrine, seekingthe basis of their cultural unity and particularity in the rural socialtraditions.124Maurer, Hanssen, Roscher, Tylor, Morgan, Kovalevsky, Laveleye,Geffroy, Viollet, Gierke, Waitz, Vinogradoff,125 together with most ofthe socialists and anarchists of the nineteenth century maintained theprecedence of the collectivist sequence both in time and as the conceptualbuilding block of society; they did so for opposed reasons: Maurer andGierke were conservative patriots and nationalists; the socialists andanarchists were internationalists and revolutionaries. Laveleye opposedMarx, joined himself to J. S. Mill, as Kovalevsky to Comte and Maine,but also sought Marx out.The collectivist side was borne into the study of man in the twentiethcentury by the doctrines of Durkheim, Stein, Toennies, Frobenius,J. Kulischer, Bergson, and Kroeber.126 The origin of the family out ofthe promiscuous horde, expressed by J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan,Morgan, Engels, J. Atkinson was then taken up variously by the psychoanalyticschools of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In the same period,Simkhovich, Kaufman, Chuprov and Kachorovsky collected evidence ofthe antiquity of the rural commune and its survival into modern timesamong the Russians and other peoples of the Russian empire.127 PaulLafargue, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Heinrich Cunow developedthis side of the evolution of the collectivity within the socialistcamp.128Baden-Powell opposed Maine’s theory of the primacy of the collectivistinstitutions both on the ground that Maine’s use of the evidence fromIndia was partial and on the ground that collectivism as a social theory7i