The Compulsive Basis of Social Thought: As Illustrated by the Varying Doctrines as to the Origins of Marriage and the Family

The science of anthropology is closely bound up with the doctrine of evolution. Both grew out of the same milieu. Nineteenth-century anthropologists were interested primarily in finding universal evolutionary laws which would explain the rise of man from primitivism to nineteenth-century civilization. They studied primitive man less to find out what he was like than what they thought he ought to be like. The doctrine of evolution was used first by anthropologists as an absolutistic concept. In the strife that ensued the problems of primitive communism, private property, and family organization became the dividing issues at stake. Anthropological doctrine was employed in defense of class logic. Morgan was adopted as the intellectual advocate of the radical outlook, and Westermarck emerged as the exponent of the middel-class position. Westermarck's evidence, which has been shown to have been based upon inadequate observation and false premise, was uncritically accepted by most of the leading thinkers during the last generation. Even Malinowski, as is shown, fell into the same fallacy. The recent investigations in mammalogy have proved this in conclusive detail. The best way to explain the attitudes and convictions at work in this controversy -and all similar controversies-is by means of the theory proposed here, namely, the theory of cultural compulsives. The existence of cultural compulsives make objectivity in the social sciences impossible. One can be objective only in the observation of detail or the collection of facts-but one cannot be objective in their interpretation. Interpretation necessitates a mind-set, a purpose, and end. Such mind-sets, such purposes, such ends, are controlled by cultural compulsives.