Property: Its Origin and Development

Abstract

LESS than a generation ago the history of early civilization was summed up, if not in the three words hunting, pasture, and agriculture, at least in the formula of Sir Henry Maine: “Society develops from family to tribe, and from tribe to State.” Recent inquiries have discredited both of these formulas, and taken us back to the genesis of the family itself, and beyond civilization to barbarism and savagery. If we listen to Prof. Letourneau (to say nothing of Morgan and Maclennan), we may reconstruct the evolution of society in all its stages out of savagery by the “ethnographic method,” “looking upon existing inferior races as living representatives of our primitive ancestors” (Preface, page ix). It must be remembered that in using this ethnographic method we assume that the order of progress has been substantially identical in all cases, and also that the simplest forms come first in time (p. 70, cf. 126). Both assumptions would need justification before the results of the new method could be finally accepted. Property: Its Origin and Development. By Chas. Letourneau, General Secretary to the Anthropological Society of Paris, and Professor in the School of Anthropology. (Walter Scott, 1892.)