Friederich Engels and Contemporary Problems Concerning the History of Primitive History

A hundred years have passed since publication of the first edition of Engels's book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, which Lenin regarded as "one of the basic works of modern socialism."1 Engels's interest in the remote past of mankind and Lenin's evaluation of his work were, of course, not coincidental. They may be explained by the tremendous role played by the concept of primitive history in a general materialist understanding of the universal historical process. What was the nature of this very first term in the sequence of socioeconomic formations, this cornerstone of the Marxist concept of universal history? When did private property, antagonistic social classes, and state power, separate from the people, emerge, and what were they: original and permanent institutions, or historically determined institutions of human communal life? These problems are clearly of great philosophical importance. They were, and continue to be, the arena of a bitter ideological struggle, and inevitably attracted the most conscientious attention of the founders of sceintific communism

Communism · Cornerstone · Epistemology · Ideology · Marxist philosophy · Materialism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Private property · Property (philosophy) · Social science · Socialism · Sociology · State (computer science) · Critical Theory and Philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

• The Transition to a Society With a State in the South East of the Iberian Peninsula (6th–4th Century Bc)

  Open Access•Juan A Santos Velasco•Oxford Journal of Archaeology•1989

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