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.

These questions had to be raised at a time when all the old ties of society were loosened and all traditional conceptions tottering. The size of the world had increased tenfold at a bound. Instead of one quadrant of one hemisphere, the whole globe now spread before the eyes of West Europeans who hastened to take possession of the other seven quadrants. And the thousand-year-old barriers of conventional medieval thought fell like the old narrow obstacles to marriage. An infinitely wider horizon opened out before the outer and inner eyes of humanity. What mattered the well-meaning propriety, what the honorable privilege of the guild overcome through generations to the young man tempted by the gold and silver mines of Mexico and Potosi?

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