In a passage that an Irish audience might regard as a wickedly inaccurate jest, Karl Marx wrote that the “country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its future.” To be fair, Marx later in Das Kapital acerbically analyzed the plight of Ireland: “only an agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.” But at that time colonies did not offer evidence of the fabled industrial tendencies “working with iron necessity toward inevitable results.” As deterministic as that phrase sounds, Marx was driven on occasion to admonish disciples who “absolutely must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism into an historicophilosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself…”

Ironically, a host of twentieth-century scholars hostile to Marxism identified progress with an image of lockstcp industrial development. In his Non-Communist Manifesto, W. W. Rostow, for example, championed the Saint-Simonian notion of “stages of growth” leading mankind linearly from the squalid pre-Newtonian world to one enjoying “the blessings and choices opened up by the march of compound interest.”