All history must be studied afresh, and the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc. Marx goes on to illustrate how the same factors can in different historical contexts produce very different results so that quick and easy generalizations are not really possible. The most important such division is that between manual and intellectual labor whereby one class produces a given society's wealth while another is able to monopolize control of the means of production.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!When swift strides are taken from one form of social structure to another, the old days and ways stand out in startling contrast, and even conflict, with the new.

For many Enlightenment philosophers, the power of ideas became the mainspring for understanding historical change and the rise and fall of civilizations. The functional explanation requires that the secondary factor tend to have a causal effect on the primary, for this dispositional fact is the key feature of the explanation.Hegel was the foremost modern exponent of this theory that the progress of mankind consisted in the working out and consummation of an idea. The need for theorising about history or the nature of society does not arise until civilisation is well advanced and sudden, violent, and far-reaching upheavals in social relations take place during the lifetime of individuals or within the memories of their elders. This means that all parts of society, for example, science, art, law, labor and the economy, the state and the family etc. Thucydides, the narrator of the Peloponnesian Wars in the fourth century BC, had a far more realistic view of history than did St.

Cohen argues in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence that a society's superstructure stabilizes or entrenches its economic structure, but that the economic base is primary and the superstructure secondary. His “new science” of history sought to discover and apply “the universal and eternal principles—on which all nations were founded, and still preserve themselves”.The outcome is that ideas, institutions and bodies of society are reconfigured into new forms expressing new characteristics. In his 1940 essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, scholar Walter Benjamin com