Vague ideas of the materialist conception of history were known before Marx formulated his view. In the sixteenth century, when capitalism was making serious inroads into feudalism, a number of writers criticised the new procedures, most of them looking back longingly to the times before these innovations. They were partly affected by the tales brought back by the discoverers of the new lands in the West and their native occupants.

Thomas More in his "Utopia", written in 1516, criticised the economic conditions of his time and argued that crime was the product of social conditions, the result of poverty. He asks what could men do who had been driven off the land and were unable to find jobs. They must either starve or become thieves. Here is his point of view - referring to peasants who had been driven off the land as the result of land enclosures:

"By one means therefore or by other either by hook or crook they must needs depart away, poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers, with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale; yet being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they do but steal and then justly pardy be hanged or else go about begging. Yet then they be cast into prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not, whom no man will set to work, though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto. For one shepherd or herdman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands were requisite."

Campanella in his "City of the Sun", 1619, attributes social changes to the stars. He describes the relation of the geographical environment to social changes. Later Buckle's and Jevon's sun spot theory was somewhat similar.

In 1656 Harrington, in his "Oceana" proclaimed the opinion that the distribution of property determines the nature of government, and that the political philosopher is therefore concerned with the distribution of property: Gooch, in his "History of Democratic Ideas of the Seventeenth Century" says of Harrington: "Alone of all his contemporaries, Harrington understood that the causes of the great upheaval (the Revolution of 1640) which had been witnessed needed to be sought in the underlying social and economic transformation."

In the turmoil before the French Revolution a number of French writers expressed views on the effect of social conditions upon conduct. Amongst these were Morelly, Turgot, Mably, Meslier, Bamave, and d'Holbach.

Jean Meslier in his 'Testament of Jean Meslier", was opposed to property and believed in the common control of the wealth of society. He argued that among the evils which oppressed mankind and called for reform the worst is private property. Property means inequality, inequality leads to injustice and oppression.

The rich are respected and honoured, while the poor must toil in neglect. Property is a cause of idleness; the idle rich class finds its complement in an idle poor class. This latter class is made up of the unemployed, who, because of the present system, have nothing to do and are hence in poverty. Cupidity and its attendants, ambition and greed, are the evils in a society based upon property. Property does not unite people; but through jealousy tends to break up social harmony, and hence destroys social unity. Fraud, deception, theft and murder find their cause in property. Society might be happy were goods made common and equality secured. The basis of equality is equality of economic con-dition.

Morelly in his "Code de la Nature", 1755, wrote:
"From the sceptre to the shepherd's crook, from the tiara to the meanest monk's frock, if one asks who govern men, the answer is simple; personal interest or interest of others which vanity makes one adopt and which is always dependent on the first, but from where do these monsters get power? From property."

He denied the existence of innate ideas, as also did Helvetius who wrote "The ideas supposed to be innate are those that are familiar to and as it were incorporated with us; they are the effect of education, example, and habit." d'Holbach in his "Social System" stated:

"If wealth is the mother of vices, poverty is the mother of crimes. When a state is badly governed and wealth is too unequally divided, so that millions of men lack the necessaries of life, while a small number of citizens are surfeited with luxuries, there we see a great number of criminals, whose number punishments do not diminish. If a government punishes the unfortunate it leaves undisturbed the vices that are leading the state to ruin; it erects gibbets for the poor, whereas by bringing men to poverty it has itself made thieves, assassins, and criminals of every kind; it punishes crime, while it continually invites men to commit crime."

Turgot, one of the leading thinkers of his time, wrote the following in his "Reflections" in 1766:
"The mere workman, who has only his arms and his industry, has nothing except in so far as he succeeds in selling his toil to others. He sells it more or less dear; but this price, more or less high as it may be, does not depend upon himself alone; it results from the agreement which he makes with him who pays his labour.

The latter pays 'him as little as he can; as he has the choice among a good number of workmen, he prefers the one who works cheapest. The workmen are therefore obliged to lower the price, in competition with one another. In any kind of work it cannot fail to happen, and as a matter of fact it does happen, that the wages of the workman are limited to what is necessary to procure him his subsistence."

This is not a bad expression of the class struggle. Turgot, unlike the writers from whom we have already quoted, was not a builder of Utopias; he was a physiocrat Who considered that all wealth came from the soil. They ignored history in the sense that there were fundamental changes, and believed that the true society had only to be discovered to be put into operation.

The last of the pre-French Revolution writers we quote is Bamave. He was active in the revolution, became an opponent of Robespierre and supporter of the bourgeoisie. He understood the rise of classes and also, to some extent, the part which economic changes play in history. In his "Introduction to the French Revolution" he wrote:
"It is the nature of things, in the social period which people have reached, the territory they inhabit, their wealth, their needs, their usages, their attitudes, which determine the distribution of power."

He held that with the growth of property inequalities developed which became the basis for social classes and class distinctions. This is how he put it:
"As, before the period when commerce existed, the aristocracy is, by the nature of things, in possession of power, it is they then who make the laws, who create the prejudices and direct the habits of the people: they will be able, through the power of institutions, to counter balance for a long time the influence of natural causes." [Events, or normal developments or normal circumstances].

Even Napoleon, one of the "Great Men", had a glimmering of the truth when he made this statement:
"Mohammed's case was like mine. I found all the elements ready at hand to found an empire. Europe was weary of anarchy, they wanted to make an end of it. If I had not come probably someone else would have done like me . . . I repeat, a man is only a man. His power is nothing if circumstances and public sentiment do not favour him."

During the Cromwellian period in England Geirard Winstanley, one of the "Diggers", wrote a number of articles criticising buying and selling and private property. He advocated common ownership of land and set out in detail his Utopia. In 1649 he wrote 'The True Levellers' Standard Advanced". The following is an extract from it:
"And if the earth be not peculiar to any one branch or branches of mankind, but the inheritance of all, then is it free and common for all to work together, and eat together. And truly, you counsellors and powers of the earth, know this, that wheresoever there is a people, thus united by common community of livelihood into oneness, it will become the strongest land in the world; for then they will be as one man to defend their inheritance, and salvation (which is liberty and peace) is the walls and bulwarks of that land or city".

"Whereas on the other side, pleading for property and single interest divides the people of the land and the whole world into parties, and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed, and contention everywhere."

Winstanley, like Ba'beuf in the French Revolution, and Trotsky in the Russian Revolution, argued that the revolution had got upon the wrong track and was bringing back the evils that the revolution was supposed to remove. He was a cloth merchant ruined by the civil war.

Writers on the American revolt like Madison and Webster, and on the French Revolution like Guizot and Mignet, also scouted around the materialist conception.

Madison, a member of the convention which framed the American Constitution wrote:
"From the influence of different degrees and kinds of property on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors ensues a diffusion of society into different interests and parties."

Daniel Webster, speaking in 1820, said:
"It is just that the weight of each person in the common councils should 'bear a relation and proportion to his interest." (He was speaking of property interest).

"The English revolution of 1688 was a revolution in favour of property, as well as of other rights. It was brought about by men of property for their own security. Our own immortal revolution was undertaken, not to rihake property, but to protect it."

The above quotations will give some idea of the views prevailing before Marx made his investigations into the question and placed it on a sound basis.

Since Marx's day historians are more and more using his theory to explain the background of events in past history. Books like, to mention a few, Davis: "Influence of Wealth in Imperial Rome"; Marti: "Economic Causes of the Reformation in England"; Wibley: "Political Parties in Athens"; Pirenne: "Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe"; Ferrero: "Greatness and Decline of Rome"; Calhoun: "The Business Life of Ancient Athens"; Chenery: "Industry and Human Welfare"; Murdoch: "Economics as the Basis of Living Ethics"; and others, including historical studies of different periods published by Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Columbia universities.

In an essay in "The Science of Social Development" F. A. Broke, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society, put the position very clearly when he wrote:

"As do all human beings, like every other living creature, prove by their daily conduct that the problem of obtaining their food is the most important matter in life, anything that goes to the roots of this fundamental question and modifies it will inevitably modify every other aspect and department of human life - political, ethical, religious, etc. The clue to the social order of any particular period is to be found in the means by which people obtain their livelihood, the tools they use, and the way in which these tools are owned and controlled".

A statement in the Introduction to "Cultural Patterns and Technical Change", edited by Margaret Mead, also has a bearing on our subject:
"Technical change is also as old as civilisations and since time immemorial the ways of life of whole peoples have been transformed by the introduction of new tools and new technical procedures, as inventions like the plough, the domestication of animals, writing, the use of steam, the factory assembly line, and the internal combustion engine, have been diffused from one country to another. Relationships of relative dominance between two peoples, population balances, dynasties, and whole religious systems have been upset by some change in technology just as the inventions which underlie technological change have themselves arisen from changing conceptions of nature and of man."