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1884 book by Friedrich Engels

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats) is an 1884 anthropological treatise by Friedrich Engels. It is partially based on notes by Karl Marx to Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877). The book is an early historical materialist work and is regarded as one of the first major works on family economics.

Engels' ideas on the role of property in the creation of the modern family and as such modern civilization begin to become more transparent in the latter part of Chapter 2 as he begins to elaborate on the question of the monogamous relationship and the freedom to enter into (or refuse) such a relationship. Bourgeois law dictates the rules for relationships and inheritances. As such, two partners, even when their marriage is not arranged, will always have the preservation of inheritance in mind and as such will never be entirely free to choose their partner. Engels argues that a relationship based on property rights and forced monogamy will only lead to the proliferation of sexual immorality and prostitution. The only class, according to Engels, which is free from these restraints of property, and as a result from the danger of moral decay, is the proletariat, as they lack the monetary means that are the basis of (as well as threat to) the bourgeois marriage. Monogamy is therefore guaranteed by the fact that theirs is a voluntary sex love relationship. The social revolution which Engels believed was about to happen would eliminate class differences, and therefore also the need for prostitution and the enslavement of women. If men needed only to be concerned with sex love and no longer with property and inheritance, then monogamy would come naturally.

Following the death of his friend and co thinker Karl Marx in 1883, Engels served as his literary executor, organizing his various writings and preparing them for publication. While time consuming, this activity did not fully occupy Engels's available hours, and he continued to read and write on topics of his own. While Engels' 1883 manuscript Dialectics of Nature was left uncompleted and unpublished, he successfully published Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats: Im Anschluss an Lewis H. Morgan's Forschungen (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan) in Zürich in the spring of 1884. The writing of The Origin of the Family began in early April 1884, and was completed on 26 May. Engels began work on the treatise after reading Marx's handwritten synopsis of Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization, first published in London in 1877. Engels believed that Marx had intended to create a critical book length treatment of the ideas suggested by Morgan, and aimed to produce such a manuscript to fulfill his late comrade's wishes. Engels acknowledged these motives, noting in the preface to the first edition that "Marx had reserved to himself the privilege of displaying the results of Morgan's investigations in connection with his own materialist conception of history", as the latter had "in a manner discovered anew" in America the theory originated by Marx decades before.

Engels's first inclination was to seek publication in Germany in spite of the passage of the first of the Anti Socialist Laws by the government of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. On April 26, 1884, Engels wrote a letter to his close political associate Karl Kautsky, saying he sought to "play a trick on Bismarck" by writing something "that he would be positively unable to ban". He felt this goal unrealizable owing to Morgan's discussions of the nature of monogamy and the relationship between private ownership of property and class struggle, however, these making it "absolutely impossible to couch in such a way as to comply with the Anti Socialist Law". Engels viewed Morgan's findings as providing a "factual basis we have hitherto lacked" for a prehistory of contemporary class struggle. The final decision of whether to print the book in Stuttgart "under a false style", hiding Engels's forbidden name, or immediately without alteration in a Swiss edition, was deferred by Engels to Bernstein. The latter course of action was chosen, with the book finding print early in October. His first objective was to claim that matriarchy was based on promiscuity as proved by Bachofen, who actually said it was based on monogamy.

The first edition of Der Ursprung der Familie appeared in Zürich in October 1884, with the possibility of German publication forestalled by Bismarck's Anti Socialist Law. Two subsequent German editions, each following the first Zürich edition exactly, were published in Stuttgart in 1886 and 1889. The book was translated into a number of European languages and published during the decade of the 1880s, including Polish, Romanian, Italian, Danish, and Serbian. Changes to the text were made by Engels for a fourth German language edition, published in 1891, with an effort made to incorporate contemporary findings in the fields of anthropology and ethnography into the work. The first English language edition did not appear until 1902, when Charles H. Kerr commissioned Ernest Untermann to produce a translation for the "Standard Socialist Series" of popularly priced pocket editions produced by his Charles H. Kerr & Co. of Chicago. The work was extensively reprinted throughout the 20th and into the 21st Centuries and is regarded as one of Engels' seminal works.