Frederick Engels

Sankar Srinivasan

Alick West

Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in just two months – beginning toward the end of March 1884 and completing it by the end of May. It focuses on early human history, following the disintegration of the primitive community and the emergence of a class society based on private property. Engels looks into the origin and essence of the state, and concludes it is bound to wither away leaving a classless society.Engels: “Along with [the classes] the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will re-organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquity, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.”

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Alick West, one of the leading literary critics of the Left, begins by contesting Dr. Leavis' well known argument that the traditional culture of the English people was destroyed by the industrial revolution. He claims that culture is continuous, and substantiates this claim by his interpretation of the six writers whose work is examined in this book: Bunyan, Defoe, Pater, Wilde, Priestley and Lindsay.

Alick West

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