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nydus/The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the StatePublic

This work examines the historical development of social institutions, including the family, private property, and the state, as products of human control over the environment and production. It critiques existing social structures by analyzing the evolution of human society through a socialist lens that emphasizes the role of class struggle.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER II. THE FAMILY.

any compulsion for an immoral action. How did this agree with the prevailing practice of match-making? Marriage according to bourgeois conception was a contract, a legal business affair, and the most important one at that, because it decided the weal and woe of body and spirit of two beings for life. At that time the agreement was formally voluntary; without the consent of the contracting parties nothing could be done. But it was only too well known how this consent was obtained and who were really the contracting parties. If, however, perfect freedom of decision is demanded for all other contracts, why not for this one? Did not the two young people who were to be coupled together have the right freely to dispose of themselves, of their bodies and the organs of these? Had not sexual love become the custom through the knights and was not, in opposition to knightly adultery, the love of married couples its proper bourgeois form? And if it was the duty of married couples to love one another, was it not just as much the duty of lovers to marry each other and nobody else? Stood not the right of lovers higher than the right of parents, relatives and other customary marriage brokers and matrimonial agents? If the right of free personal investigation made its way unchecked into the church and religion, how could it bear with the insupportable claims of the older generation on the body, soul, property, happiness and misfortune of the younger generation?

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