Human cultures historically vary with their material or productive basis

Evidence

We must be grateful to Ronald L. Meek for writing the prehistory of the concept of a “mode of production” (as that will later be worked out in the writings of Morgan and Marx), which in the eighteenth century took the form of what Meek calls the “four stages theory.” This theory came together in France and the Scottish Enlightenment, as the proposition that human cultures historically vary with their material or productive basis, which knows four essential transformations: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 861

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘four stages theory’ and its core proposition that culture tracks productive basis — the intellectual raw material for the mode-of-production concept.
• XREF: Connects to chapter 1’s periodization of cultural styles and the reader’s key idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing. — connects to: Cultural forms are causally rooted in the daily circulation of capital. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1888; The economy’s weight relative to society varies historically rather than ontologically — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1176; Each mode of production generates its own historically specific forms of cultural meaning — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 209 (+3 more)