John Ferguson Mc Lennan - Publications

Publications

McLennan undertook the article on "Law" for the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It looked back to the Scottish tradition of Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith; but in it he speculated also on the custom of collusive abduction seen in classical antiquity. Via conjectural steps involving the form of polyandry as it might have evolved, he found the topic that led on to his major work. It has been suggested that McLennan was motivated by disagreement with Henry Maine, on questions of legal reform, to examine Maine's Ancient Law; McLennan wrote attacks on Maine that were not published in his own lifetime.

In 1865 McLennan published Primitive Marriage. In it he argued from symbolic and ceremonial forms of bride kidnapping. His ideas had been partially anticipated by Johann Jakob Bachofen, writing in 1861 on matriarchy, but were independent. McLennan developed from ethnographic data a social evolutionist theory of marriage, and also of systems of kinship according to natural laws. He rejected patriarchal society as an early stage, arguing in favour of agnation as a more basic evolutionary point; he proposed an early model of social groups, a war band mainly male, practicing female infanticide and acquiring female sexual partners, with promiscuity and matrilineality salient features.

In 1866 McLennan wrote in the Fortnightly Review (April and May) an essay on Kinship in Ancient Greece, in which he proposed tests for the history of kinship claimed in Primitive Marriage. Three years later, in the Fortnightly Review for 1869–70, he developed his ideas on totemism from indications in the earlier essay.

A reprint of Primitive Marriage, with Kinship in Ancient Greece and some other essays not previously published, appeared in 1876, under the title of Studies in Ancient History; the new essays included The Divisions of the Irish Family, and On the Classificatory System of Relationship. A Paper on The Levirate and Polyandry, following up the line of his previous investigations (Fortnightly Review, 1877), was the last work he was able to publish.

McLennan also wrote a Life of Thomas Drummond (1867). The materials which he had accumulated on kinship were edited by his widow and Arthur Platt, under the title Studies in Ancient history: Second Series (1896).