Proudhon arrived at a view of history similar to that presented by Rousseau in The Social Contract, whereby the free individual makes a contract with other such individuals to establish society based on a set of legal rules designed for their mutual advantage. Duhring does a similar thing.
“Herr Dühring thus splits society up into its simplest elements, and discovers in doing so that the simplest society consists of at least two people. With these two people he then proceeds to operate axiomatically. And so the basic moral axiom spontaneously presents itself:
“Two human wills are as such completely equal to each other, and in the first place one can demand positively nothing from the other”. This “characterises the basic form of moral justice”, and equally that of legal justice, for “we need only the utterly simple and elementary relation of two persons for the development of the fundamental concepts of right”.” (p 121-2)
Rousseau's concept of the free individual, living outside society is a bourgeois, liberal myth, because no such state ever existed. Humans have always lived in some form of society. Even if we take the fictional character of Robinson Crusoe, based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, Crusoe did not appear ready formed on his island, but was a product of society, before being shipwrecked. The same is true of Proudhon's individual, and, here, too, of Duhring's. Society does not arise out of some agreement between formerly separated individuals, and class society certainly does not represent some voluntary association of free and equal individuals.
“Not only is it not an axiom that two people or two human wills are as such completely equal to each other it is actually a great exaggeration. In the first place, two people, even as such, may be unequal in sex, and this simple fact leads us on at once to the conclusion that the simplest elements of society — if we enter into this childishness for a moment — are not two men, but a man and a woman, who found a family, the simplest and first form of association for the purpose of production.” (p 122)
Engels notes that this does not suit Duhring's purpose, because the two families must be made as equal as possible. It can only be rationally understood as two heads of households, otherwise, procreation and the continuation of society is not possible. Engels proceeds on the basis of two male heads of households, but his research based on the work of Morgan, showed that, originally, these households had female heads, in a system of matriarchy. One reason for that was that, in consanguineous families, based on polygamy, actual lineage could could only be definitively attributed via the mother. The same logic applies, however. Reproduction could no more proceed from a society of just two women than it could two men.
“Consequently, one thing or the other: either the Dühringian social molecule, by the multiplication of which the whole of society is to be built up, is doomed from the first, because two men can never by themselves bring a child into the world; or we must think of them as two heads of families. And in that case the whole simple basic scheme is turned into its opposite: instead of the equality of people it proves at most the equality of heads of families, and as women are not consulted, it further proves that they are subordinate.” (p 122)
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