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==Model and qualification==
In developing [[Alexis de Tocqueville]]'s observations,{{clarify|reason=What observations, precisely? Alexis de Tocqueville isn't even mentioned in the lead. This is the first mention. "Oh darn, maybe it was a bad idea to skip yesterday's lecture because now I don't know where this lecture is jumping off" is not a feeling I enjoy on Wikipedia.|date=December 2024}} Marx identified [[Civil society#Modern history|civil society]] as the economic base and [[political society]] as the political superstructure.<ref>{{cite journal|author-first=Pawel |author-last=Zaleski |title=Tocqueville on Civilian Society. A Romantic Vision of the Dichotomic Structure of Social Reality |journal=Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte |publisher=Felix Meiner Verlag |volume=50 |date=2008}}</ref> Marx postulated the essentials of the base–superstructure concept in his preface to ''[[A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy]]'' (1859):
{{blockquote|In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite ''forms of social consciousness''. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.<ref>{{cite book|author-last=Marx |author-first=Karl |author-link=Karl Marx |date=1977 |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm |title=A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy |___location=Moscow |publisher=Progress Publishers}} Notes by R. Rojas</ref>}}
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