Preface to the First Edition¶
Core Argument¶
Engels opens this preface by framing his work as the execution of a bequest from Marx, who had intended to synthesise Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological discoveries with the materialist conception of history. Engels immediately establishes Morgan’s significance: Morgan, independently and in America, had rediscovered the materialist approach to history that Marx had formulated forty years earlier, and his comparative study of barbarism and civilisation arrived at conclusions parallel to Marx’s own. Engels notes that Morgan’s Ancient Society suffered the same fate as Capital — plagiarised by German economists while being silenced by neglect, and similarly ignored by the spokesmen of ‘prehistoric’ science in England. The present work, Engels explains, is a meagre substitute for what Marx could have done, but it incorporates Marx’s critical notes on Morgan’s extracts.
The core theoretical claim of the preface is a restatement and elaboration of the materialist conception of history. The determining factor in history, Engels writes, is the production and reproduction of immediate life, which is twofold: the production of the means of existence (food, clothing, shelter, tools) and the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organisation of any epoch is determined by both kinds of production — the stage of development of labour and of the family. Crucially, Engels argues that the lower the development of labour and the more limited its products, the more social order is dominated by kinship groups. As productivity develops, private property, exchange, wealth differences, and the exploitation of labour power emerge, generating class antagonisms. These new social elements eventually collide with the old kinship-based order, breaking it up and replacing it with a society centred on the state, whose units are local rather than kinship-based. In this new society, the family system is completely dominated by the system of property, and class struggles become the content of all written history.
Engels attributes to Morgan the great merit of having discovered and reconstructed the prehistoric basis of written history, using the kinship groups of North American Indians as the key to solving the riddles of earliest Greek, Roman, and German history. He defends Morgan’s book as an epoch-making work, the product of nearly forty years of labour.
Engels then clarifies his own contribution. The reader can distinguish what comes from Morgan and what Engels has added. For the historical sections on Greece and Rome, Engels supplemented Morgan’s evidence with his own material. The sections on the Celts and Germans are largely Engels’s own work, as Morgan relied on secondary sources and, for German conditions, on the ‘worthless and liberalistic falsifications’ of Mr Freeman — a notable polemical swipe. Engels also reworked the economic aspects, which were adequate for Morgan’s purpose but insufficient for his own. He takes responsibility for all conclusions drawn, except where Morgan is expressly cited. The preface is dated 1884.