There is a close relationship between Marx's thought and the onset of modernity; indeed the very idea of Marxism is inconceivable outside of the historical conjunction of Enlightenment philosophy, economic rationalization, techno-scientific innovation and social detradtionalization which emerged in Europe after the Middle Ages. Marx's intellectual project is marked by an increasingly acute sense of the economic and technological mechanisms through which the old feudal order was being displaced by a new regime based on the realization of profit through the sale of commodities. The dynamics of this process are, of course, very complex; the old regime did not simply cede its place to the new, and entered into a period of violent conflict with the emergent forms of mercantile and manufacturing capital. However, the tendency towards the rationalization of production that was initiated by the commodity form is, for Marx, the seed of the future; for in the end, the feudal economy, with its reliance on absolutist authority and archaic agrarianism, could not compete with the new forms of trade and manufacture which had established themselves in the cities. Thus, by the early nineteenth century a proto-capitalist economy had emerged in Europe; an economy which, despite the continued predominance of agricultural production, had begun to establish the exchange of commodities for money as the dominant form of economic activity, to determine the legal conditions of free citizenship, and to extend the cooperative regime of manufacture into a plurality of different kinds of craft production.