SOURCE: “Engels' Origin of the Family as a Contribution to Marx's Social Economy,” in Review of Social Economy, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, December, 1979, pp. 345-369.

In the following essay, Wiltgen provides an interpretation of Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and maintains that through such anthropological studies, Engels succeeded in offering “a detailed exposition of the socioeconomic development of pre-capitalist societies.”

Marx's method was largely historical. As a consequence, a proper understanding of Marx's social economy requires a good grasp of what he termed “the materialist conception of history.” Marx's and Engels' most extensive treatment of their approach to history was in their German Ideology, an unpublished manuscript which they completed in 1846 and “abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice” after failing to secure a publisher for it. [Marx, 1970, p. 22] Nonetheless, Marx's preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) is most...