LEACOCK ON MORGAN,
ENGELS, AND STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
The passages below are from Eleanor
Burke Leacock's lengthy and valuable “Introduction” to the 1972
International Publishers edition of Frederick Engels' essay on The
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884).
Engels' work is based on Morgan's Ancient
Society, and on notes on that and other works written by Marx
during the years 1879-82.
The categorization of successive levels in the integration
of matter, as a step toward understanding, is taken more for granted in
the natural than in the social sciences. To a greater extent than the social
sciences, the natural sciences have been able to disentangle themselves
from a metaphysical attempt to put the “things” of this world in their
rightful places and the disillusionment that follows when this does not
work. For example, it is taken for granted that the existence of forms
intermediate between plants and animals does not invalidate the categories
“plant” and “animal” but illuminates the mechanisms that were operative
in the development of the latter from the former. Discovering that a whale
is not a fish deepens the understanding of mammalian processes. Rather
than calling into question the category “fish”, the discovery indicates
the functional level more basic to the category than living in the sea.
The fact that some hunting, gathering and fishing societies have achieved
institutional forms generally found only with the development of agriculture
does not invalidate the significance of distinguishing between food gathering
and food production. Instead an examination of such societies deepens the
understanding of why the distinction is significant and clarifies some
of the reasons why on the whole there are rather marked differences in
social organization between hunter-gatherers and simple agriculturists.
It used to be commonplace in American anthropology,
following the anti-evolutionary empiricism associated with the name of
Franz Boas, to question Morgan's sequence of stages since many groups,
including some Morgan gave as instances, do not really “fit” into a particular
stage. However, Morgan himself knew the limits of his scheme, which he
offered as “convenient and useful”, but “provisional.” He wrote that he
would have liked to base his major divisions on the “successive arts of
subsistence,” which he saw as : (1) subsistence on available fruits and
roots; (2) addition of fish with the use of fire, and slow addition of
meat as a permanent part of the diet, particularly after the invention
of the bow and arrow; (3) dependence on cultivated cereals and plants;
(4) dependence on meat and milk of domesticated animals; and (5) “unlimited
subsistence” through improvement of agricultural techniques, notably through
harnessing the plow to domesticated animals. However, he found himself
unable to relate each new technique satisfactorily to a social stage. His
aim was perhaps for too precise a fit, and he was, after all, working with
limited data. “Investigation has not been carried far enough in this direction
to yield the necessary information,” he wrote, so that he had to fall back
on “such other inventions or discoveries as will afford sufficient tests
of progress to characterize the commencement of successive ethnical periods.”
These were: fish subsistence and the knowledge of fire (marking the transition
from the primeval period of lower savagery to that of middle savagery),
the bow and arrow (initiating upper savagery), pottery (lower barbarism),
domestication of animals and the use of irrigation in agriculture (middle
barbarism), iron (upper barbarism), and the alphabet and writing (civilization).
Engels accepted Morgan's criteria, but he clarified
and emphasized the major distinction between the periods of so-called “savagery”
and “barbarism”, each taken as a whole. The former, he wrote, was “the
period in which man's appropriation of products in their natural stage
predominates,” and the latter was “the period during which man learns to
breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods
of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.” This distinction
is now commonly phrased by anthropologists as that between food gathering
and food production. With civilization, Engels wrote, “man learns a more
advanced application of work to the products of nature.” It is “the period
of industry proper and of art.” After elaborating on Morgan's interpretation
and adding material on early Germanic and Celtic society in his discussion
on the emergence of classes, private property and the state, Engels stated:
“civilization is, therefore... the stage of development in society at which
the division of labor, the exchange between individuals arising from it,
and the commodity production which combines them both come to their full
growth and revolutionize the whole of previous society.”
A rather simple but often overlooked confusion has
plagued subsequent discussions of historical “stages.” There is a common
failure to distinguish between the definition of stages as a necessary
preliminary step to asking meaningful questions about a given period, institution
or event, and stages seen as themselves the answers. "Stages" define major
alternatives in the structure of productive relations; they afford a conceptual
framework for the study of historical process. To place a society in a
central or transitional position in relation to one or more stages
is a necessary preliminary step to inquiry, not a straitjacket that limits
it.
* * * *
...In Western academic circles second-hand knowledge
of (or assumptions about) Marxist ideas are legion, but Marx's and Engels’
works are all too seldom read. The usual practice is to set up as Marxist
theory the straw man of economic determinism and then to knock it down.
When more inquisitive students read some of Marx’s and Engels’ works, they
commonly end up distorting the ideas they have gleaned therefrom, as they
search for modes of discourse acceptable for the publications which are
the means of successful entry into the academic brotherhood. Morgan's Ancient
Society too is seldom read, and when mentioned in college classes is
often distorted and rejected out-of-hand. Further confusions arise when
well-meaning scholars employ the slightly more acceptable name of Morgan
as a euphemism for Marx (or Engels), and the assumption grows that their
thinking was identical. After the Russian Revolution lent support
to Marx’s assumption of an impending socialist “stage” of history, a plethora
of studies anxiously attempted to demonstrate that the institutions of
class, private property, the monogamous family as the economic unit, and
even the state itself could be found in all levels of human society, and
that there was basically no predictable “order” to human history. In the
United States such studies were carried out in the tradition of the “historical”
school associated with the name of Franz Boas that emphasized the uniqueness
of each people’s individual history. In England they were conducted under
the rubric of “functionalism” that decried what was considered to be a
hopeless attempt to trace institutional origins and turned to “synchronic”
analyses of how the various institutions in any given society interrelated.
Battles among adherents of the “historical” and “functionalist” schools,
and between them and the remaining champions of “evolutionism”, often waged
hot and heavy. Among the majority of anthropologists,
however, a scarcely formulated, pragmatic eclecticism prevailed. Rapidly
accumulating material on primitive societies raised unending detailed problems
that absorbed people’s interests and enabled them to avoid many broader
theoretical questions and their troublesome implications. In the long run,
the eclecticism was perhaps not such a serious drawback. The fact of the
matter is that only through a narrow approach can “evolutionism,” “functionalism,”
and “historicism” be placed in opposition. Functional concerns are essential
to a fully conceived evolutionary theory. The hypothesis of the basic relation
between economic and other institutions is itself “functional.” “Evolutionary”
theory assumes economic factors to be primary, but it certainly does not
deny the continual internal adjustments that take place among the various
parts of a social system. Further, “evolution” cannot be studied apart
from specific histories, of which it is the theoretical or explanatory
element. Historical events can be recounted, but they cannot be understood
without recourse to a broader theory such as that supplied by “evolutionism.”
Criticisms of evolutionary theory have characteristically
emphasized the infinite variability of specific lifeways found around the
world, each the historical end product of unique events and influences.
Yet the accumulation of data has not merely documented diversity. Archaeological
researches have yielded an undeniable picture of mankind’s development
from “savage” hunters to “barbarian” agriculturalists and finally to the
“civilizations” of the Ancient East, as made explicit by the British scholar
V. Gordon Childe. Meanwhile, ethnographic data have made it increasingly
clear that fundamental distinctions among societies at different productive
levels underlie the variations among individual cultures....
...Meanwhile, the former “primitive peoples” studied
by anthropologists are emerging as new nations that are seeking social
and economic forms in keeping with both industrial technology and their
own traditions. This development renders it ridiculous to treat such societies
as isolated self-contained enclaves that can be described without a theory
of economic effects on social and political structures.
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