Premodern Society

If you live or have ever lived in a big city (I live in Chicago), one of the things you’ll notice right away is how busy it is. Honking cars, brightly lit billboards, towering skyscrapers, and massive crowds are just a few of the things you’ll see.

Now, contrast that image with a city you’ll find a few hours outside of Chicago, in Galena, Illinois. Galena has that small town, traditional feel, with picturesque houses where people move at a more leisurely pace. The social patterns that you would find in a place like Galena, Illinois, are close to what we would call premodern, or traditional, at least when compared to a city like Chicago. While there aren’t many truly premodern places left in the U.S., we still use the term premodernity to refer to those social patterns in a society that existed before wide-scale industrialization.

To truly understand what a premodern society might look like, there are some characteristics that many of them share. Premodern societies tend to be very homogeneous, where many of the people that live there are the same, usually in terms of race, ethnicity, and education level and who share a strong moral identity. There are also few specialized jobs (and few white collar ones as well) and maybe only a few industries around which the community is based. Because of this, social mobility is also somewhat limited.

However, since premodern communities are smaller, many of the people in the town get to know one another on a personal level, and these personal relationships serve as checks to behavior. For instance, if you’re caught speeding and are pulled over, anyone that passes you in a small town like Galena will probably have heard about it. Lastly, any significant change in the makeup and identity of these types of communities is slow and happens over generations.