Karmaşıklık

(İng. complexity)

Göndermeler

Diğer

We shall use the phrases 'agrarianate' society or culture to refer not just to the agrarian sector and the agrarian institutions immediately based on it, but to the whole level of cultural complexity in which agrarian relations were characteristically crucial, which prevailed in citied societies between the first advent of citied life and the technicalizing transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The term 'agrarianate', in contrast to 'agrarian', then, will refer not only to the agrarian society itself but to all the forms of society even indirectly dependent on it —including that of mercantile cities and of pastoral tribesmen. The crucial point was that the society had reached a level of complexity associated with urban dominance —in this sense, it was 'urbanized'— but the urban dominance was itself based, directly or indirectly, primarily on agrarian resources which were developed on the level of manual power: based on them not in the sense that all must eat but that (since most production was agricultural) the income of crucial classes was derived from their relation to the land.

The culture of agrarianate citied society can be characterized as a distinct type in contrast both to the pre-literate types of culture that preceded it and to the Modern technicalistic culture that has followed. In contrast to precitied society —even to agricultural society before the rise of cities— it knew a high degree of social and cultural complexity: a complexity represented not only by the presence of cities (or, occasionally, some organizational equivalent to them), but by writing (or its equivalent for recording), and by all that these imply of possibilities for specialization and large-scale intermingling of differing groups, and for the lively multiplication and development of cumulative cultural traditions. Yet the pace of the seasons set by natural conditions imposed limits on the resources available for cultural elaboration, moreover, any economic or cultural development that did occur, above the level implied in the essentials of the symbiosis of town and land, remained precarious and subject to reversal —in contrast to the conditions of Modern times, of our Technical Age, when agriculture tends to become one 'industry' among others, rather than the primary source of wealth (at least on the level of the world economy as a whole).