The philosophical contention that society as such is an organism goes back to Plato and Aristotle. Since the Romantic period, however, many aesthetes and literati have used the term "organic society" to denote a specific, idealized kind of society against which modern civilization is to be judged. For them the "organic society" is local, rural and traditional rather than cosmopolitan, urban and mobile. Its central feature is that in it all human relations, including and especially the economic and political, are in some sense personal. This distinguishes it from both "market" and totalitarian societies, which are rejected, along with industrialism, as "mechanical".