The Science of Anthropology: An Essay on the Very Old Marx

Abstract

Marx's lifelong associations with anthropology are numerous and mutually illuminating. Historically, according to the commonest view, the rise of anthropology occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century-and so of Marx's own life. At the time of his birth (1818) this field was still part of general philosophy; by the time of his death (1883) it had declared its independence as a separate discipline. What is more, the development of Marx's thought followed a similar trajectory from a philosophically idealist to a positive and scientific approach to man, as most of his contemporaries regarded this transformation. As a teenage student at the University of Berlin, Marx took a course in Anthropologie with H. Steffans as part of his studies toward a law degree; and several of his early publications were directly or indirectly concerned with the sort of theoretical anthropology taught in conjunction with philosophy and jurisprudence.1 His interests in the field continued in various ways throughout his life but emerged most prominently in his last years, when he began amassing notes on a quartet of modem anthropologists (Lewis Henry Morgan, Henry Sumner Maine, John Lubbock, and John Budd Phear), presumably in order to devote a more systematic work to anthropology in the context of his own social philosophy.2 That work was never begun, though Engels continued some of these lines of investigation, and so the direction of Marx's thought is largely a matter of speculation. About the provenance and development of his anthropological thinking, however, we are much better informed; and it is to this question, the genesis of Marx's anthropological thought, that this paper is devoted. I. Marx and the Two Anthropological Traditions. -Ideological controversies aside, the tendency which has done most to obstruct a historical understanding of Marx's thought has been to select an artificial or stereotyped perspective based on a superficial reconstruction of particular academic fields, especially philosophy, political thought, sociology, and economics.3 The trouble is not that such views are incorrect but that