Division of labour in a society, and the corresponding tying down of individuals to a particular calling, developes itself just as does the division of labour in manufacture, from opposite starting-points. Within a family,[1] and after further development within a tribe, there springs up naturally a division of labour, caused by differences of sex and age, a division that is consequently based on a purely physiological foundation which division enlarges its materials by the expansion of the community, by the increase of population, and more especially by the conflicts between different tribes, and the subjugation of one tribe by another. On the other hand, as I have before remarked, the exchange of products springs up at the points where different families, tribes, communities, come in contact; for, in the beginning of civilisation, it is not private individuals but families, tribes, &c., that meet on an independent footing. Different communities find different means of production and different means of subsistence in their natural environment. Hence, their modes of production, and of living, and their products are different. It is this spontaneously developed difference which, when different communities come in contact, calls forth the mutual exchange of products, and consequent gradual conversion of those products into commodities. Exchange does not create the differences between the spheres of production, but brings such as are already different into relation, and thus converts them into more or less inter-dependent branches of the collective production of an enlarged society. In the latter case, the social division of labour arises from the exchange between spheres of production, that are originally distinct and independent of one another. In the former, where the physiological division of labour is the starting point, the particular organs of a compact whole grow loose and break off, principally owing to the exchange of commodities with foreign communities, and then isolate themselves
- ↑ Note to the third edition. Subsequent very searching study of the primitive condition of man, led the author to the conclusion, that it was not the family originally developed into the tribe, but that, on the contrary, the tribe was the primitive and spontaneously developed form of human association, on the basis of blood relationship, and that out of the first incipient loosening of the tribal bonds, many and various forms of the family were afterwards developed. (Ed. 3rd ed)
