M arx and E ngels on the Family

Abstract Social philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote on the family several times throughout their careers, the most notable cases being Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State , and Marx and Engels's coauthored The Holy Family . In The Origin of the Family , Engels used the term “family” to denote the social organization of reproduction and production of daily life at all stages of human society. Beyond The Origin of the Family and The Holy Family , Marx and Engels paid scholarly attention to the family in their coauthored Communist Manifesto and in The German Ideology , both functioning as intellectual efforts to support the program of Marxism from anthropological and dialectical (philosophical) points of view. Marx often used discussions of the family to critique the philosophy and logic of his early influence G. W. F. Hegel. Engels's work involving the history and organization of the family exerted a substantial influence in late nineteenth‐century intellectual thought and has since enjoyed a revival among contemporary socialists and feminists.