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In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Friedrich Engels builds on Karl Marx’s notes and the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s research to explain how human society developed through material changes in labor, technology, and social organization. Engels adopts Morgan’s three-stage model—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—to trace the evolution of the family, private property, and the state.
In early society, Engels describes a period of “primitive promiscuity” without formal family structures, incest taboos, or private property. The earliest family form, the consanguine family, allowed sexual relations among siblings and was based on matrilineal descent, as paternity could not be reliably determined. Kinship was organized through gentes, or clans, where women held social authority and labor was cooperative.
With the rise of agriculture, animal domestication, and pottery in the stage of barbarism, human communities became more stable and productive. The punaluan family introduced group marriage and formal incest taboos, leading to more structured matrilineal societies. The Iroquois, for example, lived in democratic clans governed by women, where property and leadership passed through the mother’s line.
The transition to civilization began with the discovery of iron and the invention of writing. These technological advances created economic surpluses and led to the accumulation of private property. Men, seeking to pass wealth to their biological heirs, replaced mother-right with father-right, leading to the rise of monogamy. Engels argues monogamy was not rooted in love but in the need to ensure paternity and male inheritance. This shift marked what Engels called “the world-historic defeat of the female sex,” as women were subordinated within the patriarchal family and excluded from social production.
As class divisions deepened, the state emerged—not as a neutral authority, but as a tool for protecting property and ruling-class interests. Unlike kin-based institutions, the state enforced order through territorial control, laws, and violence. Engels shows how communal institutions were hollowed out across societies like Greece, Rome, and Germany as private property and patriarchal power took hold.
In modern bourgeois society, Engels argues that monogamy and the state continue to uphold inequality. Marriage becomes a legal institution rooted in economic dependence, often amounting to legalized prostitution. Even with legal equality, women’s subordination persists through material constraints.
Yet Engels identifies the working class as the force capable of transforming these conditions. In proletarian families, where property and inheritance are absent, relationships become more equal and based on mutual respect. As women enter wage labor and patriarchal authority erodes, the conditions emerge for a future society based on gender equality, collective ownership, and the abolition of the state. For Engels, both the family and the state are historical institutions—products of class society—that will ultimately disappear with the rise of socialism.