Pre-Industrial Societies Quotes

“Most people, and certainly all members of Western civilization, are [...] born into a world which differs radically from that of their ancestors, with the result that most of human history is a closed book to them.”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

“In short, the superhuman beings and laws that petty human beings see as the source of their socio-political organization must do more than simply provide rules. They must also justify those rules, explain why they are good even though they feel uncomfortable, how they are conducive to happiness, indeed why there is so much unhappiness to overcome and why those who live by the rules rarely seem to be any less unhappy than the rest; and this almost invariably involves explaining why the world exists, what humans are doing in it, how their society relates to it, how and why they should go on, or alternatively how and why they ought to get out of it all again. The more complex a society, the more elaborate its belief system will be, obviously because the more variety there is in the human condition, the more there is to explain.”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

“Since people of necessity see things from their own perspective, much of what they say adds up to comforting ideas or outright propaganda for themselves and the groups to which they belong.”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

“... humans are animals. It would not occur to an ethologist studying ants, lions, wolves or giraffes to argue that 'ultimately' it is the animal's need for food which determines the type of society in which it lives, or its need to reproduce, or its mechanisms of defence against predators, or whatever. On the contrary, he will see the society in question as the outcome of a compromise between a variety of fundamental needs and the environment in which it is set. Precisely the same is true of human societies. [...] all attempts to explain human history in terms of a single factor are misguided.”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

“ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

“we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

“To a modern student, pre-industrial politics appear to be virtually soaked in religion, both in the sense that rulers devoted much attention to religious questions [...] and in the sense that everyone talked endlessly about it, justifying and vilifying a vast range of action in religious terms. [...]

... the pre-modern world was poor in organization. Modern people are members of an immense variety of associations, both local and nationwide, or indeed international, being organized as voters, artists, scholars, scientists, antivivisectionists, devotees of this sport or that, consumers and so forth in addition to (if they so wish) as believers. But pre-industrial society was less differentiated, less wealthy and far less well equipped with means of communication. Hence there might be little or no organization above the level of household or village apart from that provided by religion. This automatically endowed religion with political importance, [...] but it also meant that religion united under its umbrella numerous activities that would nowadays be pursued under umbrellas of their own. [...] Pre-modern religion could be about anything and everything.”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

“... in pre-industrial times the army was as much an instrument for the maintenance of internal order as for defence against outsiders.
Indeed, the very distinction between internal and external warfare might be tenuous. Numerous states in history have consisted of a core area and a periphery, the former being subject to both military and administrative control, the latter to military control alone, so that regular displays of military superiority were required to keep the periphery within the fold [...] Few pre-industrial states had fixed borders, as opposed to vague frontier areas under the sway of local magnates, tribal groups, bandits or other unruly elements.”
― Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World