The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Tacitus describes the Germans as having a massive population, which must have continued to grow as they formed settlements. As they grew, they pressed their attacks on the increasingly hapless Romans, but before the Romans collapsed, they had already wreaked havoc on the whole of European civilization, having “everywhere broken up the old kinship groups and with them the last vestige of local and national independence” (184). The only institution capable of binding people into something resembling nations was the Roman state, but that state had so thoroughly mismanaged affairs for so long that there was a general collapse of all society beyond the local level. Many enslaved people were freed because nobody could afford to support them, even as many legally free people found themselves in a condition much like slavery. The German conquerors of Rome tried to reallocate property on the basis of gens, but nothing could change the fact that they were conquerors, and “rule over subjugated peoples is incompatible with the gentile constitution” (188). The best they could do was replace one state with another, and they did so by turning their military leaders into kings. Territory became the property of the monarch, under the supervision of his personal retinue of soldiers.