The category of development is one of the hardest concepts of historical movement to pin down, and therefore one of the most loosely applied; furthermore, a number of other problems are connected to this, such as the not insignificant question of whether, after the "great leap forward" of 40,000 years ago, Cro-Magnon man has developed, and if so in what way, in his human nature up to the present? Without wishing to go into a deep analysis of this wide range of problems, beginning with a cautious differentiation of culture and civilisation,2 we may merely note that progress is, in all probability, connected to the latter, to technical civilisation, whereas no qualitative leap can be shown in culture.3 The naive ideal of development that took shape in the eighteenth century became the dominant ideal in the nineteenth, with Hegelianism, Marxism and Positivism playing equal parts.4 This created a new view of history which radically secularised the Judaeo-Christian linear salvation history view and made bourgeois development the telos of world history, modelling it on the natural sciences, and treated the many evolutionary varieties accordingly. Thus, the unilinear model of development took shape, in sharp contrast to the various diffusionist theories. It can be deduced, on the basis of the comparison of the various societies, that the trend to civilisation5 that was hard to grasp in former times is only demonstrable6 quantifiably in the western European (and American) historical movements of the last two hundred years – that was where and when technical civilisation was achieved, and unquestioned development can be associated with this historical shaping.7 What can be shown as quantifiable development in pre-modern society, especially in the patrimonial empires? It is no surprise that, to the best of my belief, there have been no such research or theoretical experiments, and what there are deal with the backwardness of the "East" from the point of view of modernity;8 (the usual "achievements" list what in fact are the two-sided growth in population: the expansion of areas brought under cultivation, accompanied by destruction of the natural environment; the ever-widening distribution of manufactured goods; the slow increase of life expectancy together with the appearance of more and more diseases; the commercial impact bringing ever more varied and remote areas into brisk trade, which immediately produced unequal exchange; the levelling up of living conditions and essentials, the end product of which was faceless, easily manipulated mass society etc). It can be said that every pre-modern social formation (especially the patrimonial empires) brought in itself, one way or another, the pathogens of its decline and fall, which did not exclude at certain periods the growth of certain societal movements and their manifest success. No doubt it is possible in the case of these empires to formulate a sort of law of recurrent cyclic historical movement, which Ibn Khaldūn did six and a half centuries ago.9