The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

By the advent of recorded history, the Greeks had shed the family system they shared with the Iroquois, adopting a patrilineal and patriarchal family structure that expropriated the property of women who married in from their original gens. The Greeks established religions that mirrored patriarchal families in the elevation of a divine father, established descent through the male line, and required heiresses to marry within the gens. Historians have tried to impose the modern concept of the family on the ancient world, even though in consanguine societies husband and wife were members of different gentes, which was the primary legal unit. Nonetheless, it is clear that Greece at one point had consanguine family units rooted in the gens, with matrilineal descendance. However, at some point, there was a “conscious, purposeful interference with the naturally developed order” although the details are unclear (136). By the time of Homer, tribes had coalesced into small nations vying for both resources and status. With society too large for tribal governance, an aristocracy took form, along with popular assemblies. Privileges were for the most part not hereditary, although they could pass from father to son with popular acclaim. In the Iliad, Agamemnon is not a supreme commander, but the head of a coalition who must maintain the support of the other chieftains. As with the Iroquois, command over an army did not translate into a broader remit of political power. However, this system bore the seeds of its own destruction, as the desire to concentrate wealth within families led to constant warfare, leading to the invention of the state as the best means of securing the wealth of the most powerful families.

Ancient Athens marks the decisive point at which consanguine families and truly popular government gave way to the authority of the state and the use of public agents to suppress the people. As Athenian commerce and industry became more complex, the old tribal system broke down as families intermingled and new blood entered into the city’s workforce. To handle this new state of affairs, Athens put forth a constitution with a central authority, fusing several families into “one single nation” (143). The nation was then divided into classes, with nobles (who had been the wealthiest families) alone being able to hold public office. The new political arrangement helped the nobility enrich themselves even further, reducing the general population to penury if not outright slavery. Whereas the Iroquois lived within the limits of nature, producing a stable if not invariably prosperous existence, producers in Athens lost control of the things they were producing, and money became “the one general power before which the whole of society must bow” (146). Commercial society evolved faster than governing institutions could keep up, and soon the exploited classes had to look to themselves for protection and assistance. Solon, considered the great lawgiver of Athens, then introduced reforms to protect the property of debtors, while reconfiguring governing arrangements to give the people more power against the aristocracy. The most significant development was private ownership of property, eventually putting the old aristocracy in conflict with the newly wealthy. The next constitutional change under Cleisthenes redivided Athens along territorial lines, so that “the inhabitants became a mere political appendage of the territory” (151). Territoriality was a major concept in forming the state, but other state institutions were still a long way from their modern form. For example, there was a police force, but it consisted of enslaved people, as citizens saw policing as beneath them. They looked down on labor too, and the result was a massive enslaved population and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small ownership class.