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.
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.[
1]. 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.
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)[
2]; it was explicitly developed by
Friedrich Engels in 'his 'Dialectics of Nature
[3] and in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State''.[
4]
*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."
* 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.
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.
*
modernization theory
