Industrial society

These urban centers require the input of external energy sources in order to overcome the diminishing returns[3] of agricultural consolidation, due partially to the lack of nearby arable land, associated transportation and storage costs, and are otherwise unsustainable.

[6] There is some evidence, however, that even in ancient times, large economies such as the Roman Empire or Chinese Han dynasty had developed factories for more centralized production in certain industries.

[7] With the Industrial Revolution, the manufacturing sector became a major part of European and North American economies, both in terms of labor and production, contributing possibly a third of all economic activity.

While serfdom largely supplanted the practice in Europe during the Middle Ages, several European powers reintroduced slavery extensively in the early modern period, particularly for the harshest labor in their colonies.

The Industrial revolution played a central role in the later abolition of slavery, partly because domestic manufacturing's new economic dominance undercut interests in the slave trade.

[13] The Industrial Revolution changed warfare, with mass-produced weaponry and supplies, machine-powered transportation, mobilization, the total war concept and weapons of mass destruction.

The cementation of the Soviet Union’s position as a world power inspired reflection on whether the sociological association of highly-developed industrial economies with capitalism required updating.

The “industrial society” paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s was strongly marked by the unprecedented economic growth in Europe and the United States after World War II, and drew heavily on the work of economists like Colin Clark, John Kenneth Galbraith, W.W. Rostow, and Jean Fourastié.

[17] Other sociologists, including Daniel Bell, Reinhard Bendix, Ralf Dahrendorf, Georges Friedmann, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Alain Touraine, used similar ideas in their own work, though with sometimes very different definitions and emphases.

The principal notions of industrial-society theory were also commonly expressed in the ideas of reformists in European social-democratic parties who advocated a turn away from Marxism and an end to revolutionary politics.

[20] However, some left-wing thinkers like André Gorz, Serge Mallet, Herbert Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School used aspects of industrial society theory in their critiques of capitalism.