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Information about 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.
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A park interpreter demonstrates a typical rural kitchen of 1918 (Sauer-Beckmann Farmstead, a living history farm at the Lyndon B. Johnson State Park and Historic Site, Texas, United States). The woman's role seems pre-industrial, but the technology is already industrial.

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 opposed 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 of shit". Durkheim himself used it to describe the logic by which community norms were governed.

Karl 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" interchangeably 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 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."

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Smoking woman in bicycle, circa 1900. The pre-industrial society is gone.

Some attributes of the pre-industrial societies

  • Limited production (i.e. artisanship vs. mass production)
  • Primarily had an agricultural 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.

Bibliography

  • Grinin, L. 2007. Periodization of History: A theoretic-mathematical analysis. In: History & Mathematics. Moscow: KomKniga/URSS. P.10-38. ISBN 9785484010011.

See also

Industrial Revolution was a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation had a profound effect on socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain and subsequently spread throughout the world, a process that
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Economic systems

Ideologies and Theories
Primitive communism
Capitalist economy
Corporate economy
Fascist economy
Laissez-faire
Mercantilism
Natural economy
Social market economy
Socialist economy
Communist economy


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Émile Durkheim (IPA: [dyʁˈkɛm]; April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist whose contributions were instrumental in the formation of sociology and anthropology.
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Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuˡseʁ) (October 16, 1918 – October 22, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
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An agrarian society is one that is based on agriculture as its prime means for support and sustenance. The society acknowledges other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses on agriculture and farming, and was the main form of socio-economic organization for most of
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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.
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (IPA: [ˈgeɔʁk ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːgəl]
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Marxism is both the theory and the political practice (that is, the praxis) derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Any political practice or theory that is based on an interpretation of the works of Marx and Engels may be called Marxism; this includes
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (IPA: [ˈgeɔʁk ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːgəl]
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Marxism is both the theory and the political practice (that is, the praxis) derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Any political practice or theory that is based on an interpretation of the works of Marx and Engels may be called Marxism; this includes
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Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820 – August 5, 1895) was a German social scientist and philosopher, who developed communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator, Karl Marx, co-authoring The Communist Manifesto (1848).
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Economic determinism is the theory which attributes primacy to the economic structure over politics in the development of human history.
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In classical philosophy, dialectic (Greek: διαλεκτική) is controversy, Viz., the exchange of arguments and counter-arguments respectively advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions
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Historical materialism is the methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history which was first articulated by Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx himself never used the term but referred to his approach as "the materialist conception of history".
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Communism
Basic concepts
Marxist philosophy
Class struggle
Proletarian internationalism
Communist party
Ideologies
Marxism  Leninism  Maoism
Trotskyism  Juche
Left  Council
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Slavery is a social-economic system under which certain persons — known as slaves — are deprived of personal freedom and compelled to perform labour or services.
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Feudalism refers to a general set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility of Europe during the Middle Ages, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs.
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The term Modern Times is used by historians to loosely describe the period of time immediately following what is known as the Early Modern Times. It is to be distinguished from the term of Modernity.
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Daniel Bell (born 10 May 1919 in New York) is a sociologist and a professor emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a director of Suntory Foundation and a scholar in residence of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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The name Foucault can refer to:
  • Michel Foucault (philosopher)
  • Léon Foucault (physicist)
  • Foucault pendulum
  • Foucault's Pendulum

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Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.
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gross domestic product, or GDP, is one of the ways for measuring the size of its economy. The GDP of a country is defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time (usually a calendar year).
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Division of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and roles, intended to increase efficiency of output. Historically the growth of a more and more complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of trade, the rise of
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Parochialism means being provincial, being narrow in scope, or considering only small sections of an issue.

Like in countries where every village and every part of town has a parish ([Late] Latin: parochia) — with typically locally
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Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged with each other.
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Information is the result of processing, gathering, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the receiver. In other words, it is the context in which data is taken.
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