ABSTRACT
The philosopher Michel Foucault said Marx's relationship to his intellectual environment was that of a fish to water. As a thinker who was trying to explain modernity in the climate of nineteenth-century thinking, Marx's sources for Oriental societies are significant for understanding his ideas. Marx's general social theory and the place of Oriental societies within it can be understood with an examination of his method. Much as he used Hegel's dialectic, Marx also used Oriental societies as a mirror to the Occidental in order to place the latter into an historical context. Here, he used the explanations about Oriental societies to find a solution to the problem of explaining the birth and nature of capitalism. Thus, Marx was not trying to develop an explanation or a theory concerning Oriental societies. Marx took rational progressivism and Oriental despotism as a basic tool for explaining world history and the position held by Oriental societies.
