ABSTRACT
There are strong political undertones to such classifications, and the application of them is often a means for making subtle and complicated judgements about the West, and what it should or should not be. Apparently straightforward labels become multi-layered, rich in evaluative connotations and chains of associations that can be difficult to unravel because they are part and parcel of specific understandings about what is natural or good in the world. Marx, for example, in his essay on pre-capitalist economic formations, makes the obvious factual generalization that capitalist society is marked by productive progress in a way that the pre-capitalist world is not. He then makes a leap that links productive progress, through the division of labour, with the growth of individualism. This conclusion leads him to expand his original distinction (societies involved in productive progress and those which are not) to include the contrast of individualism and communalism-and of maturity and immaturity. For Marx, productive progress and the individualism that grew with it entailed a maturity, an elaboration of the ‘creative disposition’ (albeit ‘vulgar and mean’ in its bourgeois manifestation), that the ‘childlike world of the ancients’ with its
attachment to the communal form could not attain (1965 [1857-58]:845).
