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(1878) Ancient Society was perhaps the most influential of the early cross-cultural studies of
property, certainly for its influence on Marx and Engles (Averkieva, 1961; Engels, 1902/1884;
Koranshvili, 1980; 1982; Marx & Engels, 1888/1965). The ethnogaphic notebooks of Marx (1972)
provide further evidence of the need felt by political economists to validate their work with
cross-cultural evidence.
Arguments for and against Marxist property theories proved to be a major impetus for
cross-cultural research in the nineteenth century. Two other factors were the increasing
availability of ethnographies due to accelerating exploration, colonialization and world trade,
and the elaboration of theories of evolution by Darwin (1859) and Spencer (1885; 1972).
Although Locke, Rousseau, and Marx had presumed a natural history of cultural evolution,
Darwinism gave it an explanatory framework. This was particularly powerful when Darwin’s
primary disciple, Romanes (1883), merged cultural evolution and biological evolution, placing
primitive people between primates and civilized man on the phylogenetic scale of progression.
With a theory of progressive cultural evolution, there developed in the late nineteenth
century a most prolific to-and-fro mustering of ethnographic and ethological evidence to
support or refute Marxism. Known as comparative sociology, largely French, this started with
an ethnographic survey by LaFargue (1885), who was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, and included
response and counter response by Fustel de Coulanges (1885; 1891a,b), LaFargue (1830; 1892),
Laveleye (1878; 1891), Guyot (1895), and others. This scholarship tried to become less
polemical, and more scientific, as seen in the ethnographic survey by Letourneau (1892) and in
the biological survey by Petrucci (1905). But the underlying ideological biases were always
evident.
The comparative ethnographic study of social institutions burgeoned at the turn of the
century and assumed a place in each of the social sciences. In much of this work, property was
a prominent topic (e.g. Lewinski, 1913; Westermarck, 1908a; 1908b). However, the continuing
threat and suspicion of ideological bias in this type of research provided the motivation for the
development of more objective methods and standards.
The use of cross-cultural surveys to study social institutions is generally known as the
science of society, coined by William Graham Sumner (Davie, 1963). Sumner was an American
political economist and sociologist, best known for his Folkways (1907). Although he was a
social Darwinist, he did not accept the prevailing belief that cultural evolution progressively