The thinking start of historical materialism is the discovery of civil society by Marx.The discovery is different from that of the civil society by those thinkers before Marx.The key point of Marx’s discovery is to reveal that civil society is the area of ’relations of material life’,which belongs to a pre-rational life world.The composition of the world is ’the system of social powers’.Social power is the alienated form of human objective essential capacity,which uncovers the sensuous essence of the governance of man by man.The analysis of the properties,origin and changes of social powers is the core of historical materialism,and marks the principle and method of the doctrine,which is fundamentally different from that of popular social sciences today.
