Every period is characterised by certain widespread idées fixes, by favoured models or paradigms that migrate from field to field, sparking the most varied debates in the process. Eighteenth-century stadial theories of development took on a new life in nineteenth-century evolutionism, concepts from biology structured thinking in anthropology, sociology and philosophy, categories from philology entered historiography and the comparative study of myth and religion. And inseparable from all of these was the Victorian obsession with setting up contrasts between different types of social organisation. Writers returned again and again to the dichotomous nature of social types: organic vs mechanical, barbarian vs civilised, simple vs complex, traditional community – based on kinship ties and common ownership – vs modern society. Many viewed the history of Western civilisation in terms of a linear progression or decline, a movement from intuitive and organic kinds of association to the rational and instrumental. They traced the shift from the local village or town community to the large-scale national and international society, from the agricultural or handicraft-based family or clan governed by custom, to the industrial and commercial metropolis full of unconnected individuals ruled by state-administered legislation and interacting through self-interest in the market. They observed how capitalist production and the interchange of independent contracting parties had superseded community folk life, how individuals and the authoritative state had taken the place of fellowships and commonwealths. But not everyone translated the analytical distinction into a historical one: despite being conceptual opposites community and modernity could coexist in practice.