Morgan’s “Ancient Society”

Civilization is only a tiny fraction of man’s long span of life on this earth. It commenced when man had settled down in agricultural communities and had discovered the art of writing. Civilization is called historic society because we learn about it from written records. Prehistoric society we learn about from the archaeologist, who digs up the past, the anthropologist, who examines the skeletal remains of early man, and the ethnologist, who examines the way of life of what remains of tribal man. From the records accumulated by investigators we learn that historic society is based upon territory—property ownership, whilst prehistoric society was based upon the family— kinship. That is to say, the bond that knit social groups together in early times was the blood tie; after the advent of civilization it was the property tie.

The man who brought order into our knowledge of early society was an American ethnologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, who spent many years amongst the Iroquois Indians of North America and was admitted into their group as a blood brother. The result of his studies among these Indians profoundly affected his general view of early development, and, with the assistance of the American Smithsonian Society (a society formed to further knowledge of the American Aborigines), he was put in touch with other ethnologists all over the world. After many years of sorting and tabulating the material he had gathered himself and what he had received from others, he wrote his book “Ancient Society,” which was an attempt to explain early society as an organised growth and not the haphazard results of accident or of “great men.”

When Morgan’s book was published it was seized upon by Marx and Engels as containing the real explanation of early social development and the logical forerunner of later history. It explained social development as the result of man’s works; of his discoveries and adaptation to natural forces; of the growing artificial barrier he built between himself and raw nature. In other words, that civilized man was the product of the discoveries and inventions of countless ages.

Whatever modifications in detail were afterwards necessary, Morgan’s main outline still holds the field, and later material has helped to fill it out. But Morgan suffered the same fate as Darwin and Marx had suffered from the leading writers of his day. His ideas were too revolutionary; they challenged the inviolability of private property and hence the most valuable part of his work has been largely ignored by professors, although it is claimed that scientific men are concerned solely with truth and take no sides. Even to-day, when Morgan is quoted, it is nearly always from other books that he wrote; very rarely is “Ancient Society” referred to. In recent years, however, at least one ethnologist of note has given Morgan his due. A. C. Haddon, in a little book on “Anthropology” says this of Morgan’s achievement: —

“Morgan was undoubtedly the greatest sociologist of the past century, and in his monumental work (1877) laid a solid foundation for the study of the family and kinship systems; he formulated a scheme of the evolution of the family based on a study of the classificatory system of relationships, of which he was the discoverer.” (“History of Anthropology.”)

The following quotations from “Ancient Society” shed some light upon the reason why his book was not warmly received: —

“It is impossible to overestimate the influence of property in the civilization of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilization. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and laws are instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production; and, after the experience of several thousand years, it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making machine.” (Page 505, ” Ancient Society,” Macmillan, 1877.)

“Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the right of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.” (Page 552.)

It is a tribute to Morgan’s scientific sincerity that he faced the logical inferences of his studies of the family and property in spite of the fact that he belonged to the privileged section of society, believed privileged classes had been abolished in the United States, and still clung to supernatural ideas.

Morgan divided prehistoric society into two main sections and six subsections or ethnological periods. The two main sections are savagery and barbarism—roughly the old and the new stone age. The three subsections of savagery and of barbarism he marked off by the principal discoveries of the period—fire, the bow and arrow, pottery making, the domestication of animals, the smelting of iron and the art of writing. There is a further general division that can be made. In the early period man was a food gatherer, later he became a food producer. The production of the bow and arrow was a revolution that made him predominantly a hunter and was the link between food gathering and food producing.

Morgan traces the development of the family from original promiscuity through the development of the gens, with its restrictions upon those who were rightful husbands and wives, up to the time when the development of property introduced the monogamic (or single husband and wife) form. He traces the development of the state from the elected war chief to the establishment of hereditary military leaders and kings; from the tribal council to the government. He traces the development of property from its probable beginning after the domestication of animals up to its fully fledged form in Greek and Roman times. He showed how the intrusion of property destroyed the old primitive communities based upon the family and established in their place private property society with its constant class struggles. He also showed that the development of society was an evolutionary process which could not stop with the establishment of Capitalism. He made it clear that just as in the past different forms of the state, the family and private property had come into existence and passed away so likewise the present forms were doomed and would give place to a higher form from which the state and private property would be absent.

Morgan’s work has completely disposed of the myth that property, the family and the state, as we know them to-day, are eternal. He showed that they only appeared very late in man’s history and must inevitably disappear. He was not a socialist and evidently knew little, if anything, about Socialism, but, unintentionally, he did remarkable work to help forward the socialist movement.

Engels, in his “Origin of the Family,” summarises Morgan’s work and enriches it with additions and corrections of his own. He makes clear that Morgan had independently discovered and applied the materialist conception of history; Engels also showed how Morgan, by solving the puzzle of ancient society, had supplied the prehistoric prelude to Marx’s work and explained how class society had come into existence.
GILMAC.