Materialistic analysis of the problem allocates as the driving forces of the development of society the factors mostly of a natural-structural character.
C.L. Montesquieu has considered as the source of social development the geographical conditions and the environment: "The law, generally speaking, is a human mind, inasmuch it governs all people of the earth … They (laws) have to correspond to physical properties of the country, to its climate – to cold, hot or moderate, to qualities of the soil, its situation, sizes … in the countries, which are fertile, more often happens the ruling of one, and the infertile countries are ruled by a few, that is sometimes as if by kind of compensation for adverse natural conditions" [1, p. 168, 393].
Certainly, natural conditions are an important factor for existence – less or more favorable, but not more than that, since they are just one of many external factors – exactly conditions that can somehow affect the life of communities – but they are not the driving forces of development. In addition, as the history of primitive communities shows, regardless of geographic conditions and the natural environment, for tens of thousands of years no visible development was observed for these communities.
J.J. Rousseau believed, that the number of population should be attributed to the driving force of social development: "Before the invention of special signs, replacing all values, wealth could consist almost exclusively in lands and herds of livestock, which were the only actual good things, which people could own. But when the land ownerships, passing by inheritance from generation to generation, so increased in number and size, that they covered by themselves the whole earth and came into contact with each other, then some were able to grow only at the expense of others. Those people who did not do anything, because weakness or carelessness prevented them, in turn, to acquire land, became poor, without having lost anything, because they did not change when everything changed around. From here little by little arose domination and slavery or violence and robberies, depending on differences in character of that and others" [2, p. 83].
Free occupation of the land plots, proportional to the increase of the population really does end once with all the ensuing consequences, but this fact is difficult to consider as primary and determining in the development of communities, since it does not indicate the reason of the population growth and, therefore, it is an external factor, and not primary.