Origin of Engels’ The Origin

Abstract

Engels had based his The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State on Marx's ethnological notebooks. In this paper, I want to place the roots of Engels' book in Marx's notes and reveal the various contributions of Marx to it. Marx's notebooks provided both the motivation and the initial source material, and Engels' life-long cooperation with him also contributed to this work. However, there are some significant divergences between Engels' work and that of Marx. I will focus only on the differences related to the rise of the patriarchal family. Marx's notebooks on ethnology are published under the title The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Since it is much less known compared to Engels' book, I also would like to highlight it in the paper.