s as a new thesis, and the process continues.
Marx liked this pattern, since it provided an analytical methodology, but he applied it at the social level, so that for Marx a ôthesisö was a social movement. Marx also arrived at the insight which is central to his thought, and which is the actual basis for regarding him as a founder of modern social science: that Hegel had everything upside-down. In other words, evolution is driven from the bottom up, not from the top down.
What Marx proposed, based on his reading of history, and especially on what was just starting to be known of prehistory, was that it is the economic or technological basis of a society that is the independent variable. Social evolution is, in effect, limited by the amount of energy available for human use and consumption. (He really had not worked all this out in detail when the Communist Manifesto was written, since much of it depended on his reading of Lewis Henry MorganÆs Ancient Society, which wasnÆt published until 1859, the same year as DarwinÆs The Origin of Species, but his thinking was heading in this direction and looking for evidence to bolster itself.)
At the time the Communist Manifesto was written, Marx was still thinking in terms of ancient, medieval, and modern society, and trying to see how they differed. After the publication of MorganÆs book, he was able to think in much broader terms, as Leslie White has brought out. In his later thought, he was able to see that the major economic divisions were between primitive society, ancient/medieval (what he calls feudal) society, and modern society, and these are the divisions that Leslie White has built into his Science of Culture.
In primitive society, at what anthropologists now call the ôhunting and gatheringö stage, the energy available to humans was limited to the game they could catch by hunting and the fruits and vegetables they could gather from wild plants. During this p...