say a pre-political society, and the key
to understand how from it came all the later forms marked by monogamy,
the development of the paternal family, the appearance of property,
first of the _gens_, then of the family, lastly individual, and by the
successive establishment of the alliances between _gentes_ which are the
origin of the State. All this is illustrated by the knowledge of the
process of technique in the discovery and in the use of the means and
instruments of labor and by the understanding of the effect of this
process upon the social complexus, urging it in certain directions and
making it traverse certain stages. These discoveries may still be
corrected at certain points, notably by the study of the different
specific fashions according to which in different parts of the world the
passage from barbarism to civilization has been effected. But,
henceforth, one fact is indisputable, namely, that we have before our
eyes the general embryogenic record of human development from primitive
communism to those complex formations as at Athens or at Rome with their
constitutions of citizens arranged in classes according to census which
not long ago constituted the columns of Hercules for research into
written tradition. The classes which the Manifesto assumed have been
later resolved into their process of formation and in this can already
be recognized the plexus of reasons and of different economic causes for
the categories of the economic science of our bourgeois epoch. The dream
of Fourier to find a place for an epoch of civilization in the series of
a long and vast process has been realized. A scientific solution has
been found for the problem of the origin of inequality among men which
Rousseau had tried to solve by arguments of an original dialectic,
relying however upon too few real data.

At two points, the extreme points for us, the human process is palpable.
One of these is the origin of the bourgeoisie, so recent and in the full
light of the science of economics; the other is the ancient formation of
the society divided into classes, which marks the passage from higher
barbarism to civilization (the epoch of the State) to use expressions
employed by Morgan. All that is found between these two epochs is what
has, up to this time, formed the subject matter of the chroniclers, the
historians properly so-called, the jurists, the theologians and the
philosophers. To traverse and reanimate all this domain with