The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Engels composed Origin, published in 1884, from notes he and Marx had made from their reading of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). Regarding Morgan, Engels says, "in his own way [he] discovered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history discovered by Marx 40 years ago." Morgan's study involves analysis of the social organization of the Iroquois nation fr...