DIALECTICS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION 19 negation, as "an extremely general—and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important—law of development of nature, history and thought".38 In this connection he observed: It is the same in history, as well. All civilized peoples begin with the common ownership of the land. With all peoples who have passed a certain primitive stage, this common ownership becomes in the course of the development of agriculture a fetter on production. It is abolished, negated, and after a longer or shorter series of intermediate stage is transformed into private propeny. But at a higher stage of agricultural development, brought about by private property in land itself, private property conversely becomes a fetter on production, as is the case today both with small and large landownership. The demand that it, too, should once again be transformed into common properly necessarily arises. But this demand does not mean the restoration of the aboriginal common ownership, but the institution of a far higher and more developed form of possession in common which, far from being a hindrance to production, on the contrary for the first time will free production from all fetters and enable it to make full use of modern chemical discoveries and mechanical inventions.39 Such, then, is the dialectics of social development visualised by Engels in the Anti-Dub ring'. common ownership (primitive communism) negated by private property, which, in its turn, is negated again for the revival of communism on a higer level. For our present discussion, however, the question is: What was bis evidence for the starting point of the formulation—the evidence, in other words, of primitive communism having been a historical fact? In the Anti'Duhring itself, Engels gave us the impression of being aware of it only in a few and fragmentary forms, often inferred from its survivals in the village communities studied in prc-Morgan sociology, specially, as he says, in "Maurer's epoch-making writings on the primitive constitution of the German mark...and of the ever-increasing mass of literature, chiefly stimulated by Maurer, which is devoted to proving the primitive common ownership of the land among all civilized peoples of Europe and Asia, and to showing the various forms of its existence and dissolution.'*40 But what was the weight of all these evidences compared to those on which Morgan's Ancient Society was based? We can judge it from EngePs own observation. In 1885, writing a new perface to the Antl-Dnbring^ Engels said that one of the main points on which he would have liked to alter the book "relates...to the history of primitive society, the key to which was provided by Morgan only in 1877. But as I have since then had the opportunity, in my work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), to work up the material which in the meantime had become available