tions disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilizations and their hereditary means of subsistence." The painful spectacle of dislocation made it all the more important to remember, Marx added, that "these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always ... restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies, ... [and] subjugating man to external circumstances instead of elevating man into the sovereign of circumstances."

Conservatives did not share Marx's confidence that progress led to beneficial effects in the long run, but they agreed about the direction of historical change. The concepts of culture and civilization or their equivalents, endlessly elaborated in further sets of contrasts, furnished a vocabulary common to all shades of political opinion. In the conservative reaction following the revolution, the French themselves, originally the target of this kind of speculation, adopted its general framework if not always the same terms of comparison. Bonald's distinction between the agricultural family and the industrial family was taken over, with modifications, both by fellow conservatives like Ferdinand LePlay and by progressives like Saint-Simon and Comte, who acknowledged their indebtedness to the "retrograde school," as Comte referred to them. Everywhere the transformation of the family appeared to provide the indispensable key to an understanding of social change. Formerly the family had served as the model for every other relationship; now even marriage was based on mutual agreement and subject to revocation if the contracting parties defaulted on their legal obligations. "Status," according to Maine, derived from the "powers and privileges anciently residing in the family," and the "movement from status to contract," accordingly, defined the diminishing influence of the familial principle. "Starting, as if from one terminus of history, from a condition of society in which all the relations of persons are summed up in the relations of family, we seem to have steadily moved towards a phase of social order in which all these relations arise from the free agreement of individuals."

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