Index

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 widley 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.

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