Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881)

Famous American ethnologists, archaeologists and anthropologists; spontaneous materialist.

Morgan was born in 1818, in Aurora, New York, USA. In his childhood, Morgan was familiar with the customs of the Iroquois, a race of Indians near his hometown, and in his youth, he studied law at Union College, the second university in New York, which was founded not long ago, and after graduating from college he became a lawyer in Rochester, New York. As a lawyer, Morgan was a frequent defender of the Indians, defending their just rights, and was always in favor of the Indians in their struggle against white oppression, and thus enjoyed a high reputation among the Indians. In 1846, Morgan was adopted into the Hawk Clan, Seneca Tribe of Iroquois. In that year, he published 14 Letters on the Iroquois, and in 1851, based on an investigation of the Iroquois tribe, Morgan published a book entitled League of the Iroquois. From 1861 to 1868, he served as a member of the New York State Assembly, and from 1868 to 1869, he served as a member of the New York State Senate. From 1879 to 1880, Morgan served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1871, he published the book Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, which made a penetrating exposition of kinship relations and aroused people’s interest in the study of social development at that time. In 1872 he published another anthropological book on kinship relations in Australia. In 1875, Morgan was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1877, Morgan wrote the most important book in his life, Ancient Society, based on the materials he had observed and collected for 40 years. In the book, he explored the development process of mankind from ignorance to barbarism to civilization, and illustrated the development of mankind from the lower stage to the higher stage from four aspects, namely, the development of economy and culture, the development of the idea of government, the development of the idea of family and marriage and the development of the idea of property, and made a scientific analysis of the origin and evolution of civilization. Marx and Engels spoke highly of Morgan’s Ancient Society, and held that “this proof has cleared up at one stroke the most difficult questions in the most ancient periods of Greek and Roman history, providing us at the same time with an unsuspected wealth of information about the fundamental features of social constitution in primitive times—before the introduction of the state.” Ancient Society provided important historical materials for Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks in his later years, and during 1881–1882, Marx carefully studied Ancient Society and made very detailed excerpts and comments. Based on Marx’s Conspectus of Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society and the result of his own years of study of ancient history, Engels wrote his famous book The Origin of the Family, Private Property.