Gourt Home::Gourt :: Pre-industrial society
Pre-industrial society refers to specific social attributes and forms of political and cultural organization that were prevalent before the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Capitalism.
Synonyms
The concept of "pre-industrial society" is widely used across the social sciences and it is preferred over similar concepts that are ideologically loaded. Pre-industrial society can be said to be "value free" as oppossed to others (see objectivity). For example, it is commonly used and interchanged with the term: "traditional society", a term coined by Emile Durkheim in The Division of Labor in Society.*. One objection to this term is that tradition implies "stagnation". Therefore, this is a "loaded" term.
Marx, who gave the theoretical foundations to the concept, used the term "pre-capitalist society". However, it is not a neutral term since it implies that a transition to capitalism was a progressive or inevitable development (in Marx's view, necessary for a transition to communism). His followers (i.e. Louis Althusser) used "pre-industrial society" interchageably with that of Marx.
Other synonyms are "agrarian society"" and "pre-modern society". All of these concepts are related as they derive from Marx and Hegel's ideas. Nonetheless, each of these are not strictly "synonyms". Each has their own ideological and intellectual lineage, and deserve independent treatment.
Theoretical foundations
There are several ideas that gave way to the term: "Pre-industrial society"":
- The Marxist and Hegelian idea that history progresses forward; always towards the improvement of the spirit (as in Hegel) and/or the social conditions (as in Marx).
- The Marxist idea that history progresses in stages of development. Although this notion of gradual movement was implied by Marx (The Grundrisse)it was explicitly developed by Friedrich Engels in 'his 'Dialectics of Nature*
- In classic Marxist theory, there is the idea that the progression of human history is determined by the modes of production. (economic determinism,dialectics, historical materialism).
- The Pre-industrial stages proper are:
- 1st stage. Primitive communism (no private property)
- 2nd stage. Slavery (rise of private property)
- 3rd stage. Feudalism (consolidation of authority)
The Industrial or Modern stages are: capitalism, Socialism (a transitional stage) and communism.
Contemporary political theory claims that capitalism, avoiding socialism and communism, has already transcended the industrial stage. Daniel Bell called the current stage as the "post-industrial society"; others (in example Foucault) call the actual stage as "post-modern."
Some attributes of the pre-industrial societies
- A traditional authority. Power was manifested in many forms of personalistic authorities instead of through an impersonal state or bureaucracy.)
- Limited production (i.e. artisanship vs. mass production)
- Stagnant social change- Behavior and thought were enforced by moral/religious codes and not by the law or science.
- Primarily had an agraricultural economy
- Limited division of labor- i.e. Capitalism needs a vast amount of specialized knowledge and skills due to the complex nature of industrial production. In pre-industrial societies, production was relatively simple and, thus, the number of specialized crafts was limited.
- Limited variation of social classes
- Parochialism- Social theories hold that communications were limited between human communities in pre-industrial societies. Few had a chance to see or hear beyond their own village. In contrast, industrial societies grew with the help of faster means of communication, having more information at hand about the world, allowing knowledge transfer and cultural diffusion between them.
- Pre-industrial societies developed largely in rural communities. Capitalism developed largely in urban areas.
Criticism of the concept
In recent times, many historians have argued that the popular concepts of pre-industrial society must be qualified and relativised. The reason is that many of the social and economic phenomena normally associated with industrial society (commerce, capital markets, wage-labour, etc.) also already existed on a modest scale in many pre-industrial societies like Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, 15th Century North Italy and 17th century Netherlands.
Moreover, in merchant capitalism which preceded industrial capitalism within a largely feudal society, capitalist trading activity existed without mechanised factories operated by wage labour. Thus, the development of capitalist markets, in which more and more of the inputs and outputs of production are traded/priced goods and services, must be seen as a gradual process of evolution, and industrialization as a process which occurs unevenly in space and time.
See also
"Pre-industrial society"