to their own conclusions.

ERNEST UNTERMANN.

Chicago, August, 1902.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 1884.

The following chapters are, in a certain sense, executing a bequest. It
was no less a man than Karl Marx who had reserved to himself the
privilege of displaying the results of Morgan's investigations in
connection with his own materialistic conception of history--which I
might call ours within certain limits. He wished thus to elucidate the
full meaning of this conception. For in America, Morgan had, in a
manner, discovered anew the materialistic conception of history,
originated by Marx forty years ago. In comparing barbarism and
civilization, he had arrived, in the main, at the same results as Marx.
And just as "Capital" was zealously plagiarized and persistently passed
over in silence by the professional economists in Germany, so Morgan's
"Ancient Society"[1] was treated by the spokesmen of "prehistoric"
science in England.

My work can offer only a meager substitute for that which my departed
friend was not destined to accomplish. But in his copious extracts from
Morgan, I have critical notes which I herewith reproduce as fully as
feasible.

According to the materialistic conception, the decisive element of
history is pre-eminently the production and reproduction of life and its
material requirements. This implies, on the one hand, the production of
the means of existence (food, clothing, shelter and the necessary
tools); on the other hand, the generation of children, the propagation
of the species. The social institutions, under which the people of a
certain historical period and of a certain country are living, are
dependent on these two forms of production; partly on the development of
labor, partly on that of the family. The less labor is developed, and
the less abundant the quantity of its production and, therefore, the
wealth of society, the more society is seen to be under the domination
of sexual ties. However, under this formation based on sexual ties, the
productivity of labor is developed more and more. At the same time,
private property and exchange, distinctions of wealth, exploitation of
the labor power of others and, by this agency, the foundation of class
antagonism, are formed. These new elements of society strive in the
course of time to adapt the old state of society to the new conditions,
until the impossibility of harmonizing these two at last leads to a
complete r