ANCIENT SOCIETY

Description

“There exists an important book on the conditions of primitivesociety, as important as Darwin is in Biology, and of course it is again Marx who discovered it; Morgan,AncientSociety, 1877.” – Friedrich Engels

AncientSociety, a brilliant, significant and best known work of Lewis Morgan, attempts to explain human culture. Morgan’s refutation of the Book of Genesis, his theory of primitive promiscuity, his materialism, and his emphasis upon the role of property in the course of social evolution provoked heated opposition. This controversial classic work of anthropology is believed to be the first modern inquiry into social evolution.

Lewis Henry Morganwas a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. He was a contemporary of the European social theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were influenced by reading his work on social structure and material culture, the influence of technology on progress. Morgan is the only American social theorist to be cited by such diverse scholars as Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud.