Morgan, Lewis Henry

(1818-81)

A New York State lawyer whose interest in the ethnography of native Americans led him to develop a kinship classification system (Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, 1871) that eventually yielded a conjectural history of the family (Ancient Society, 1977) which was the basis of Friedrich Engels's work on the origins of the family and the state.

Morgan was an essentially evolutionary theorist (see evolutionism ), whose project was to examine the progress of human society from a state of original promiscuity to modern monogamy, which he saw as the basis of the modern state. History was thus driven by a moral imperative, and the legitimacy of modern state forms and monogamous relationships were neatly coincident. Although his conjectural history is no longer taken seriously, the moral link between family and state persists in the twentieth century, not only in political thought but also in functionalist theories of the family.