Postagrarian Society

Definition

Postagrarian society is Jane Jacobs's name for the epochal economic transformation of the present: the shift from agrarianism — ten to twelve thousand years of economies organized by land and food production — to economies whose wealth is generated by "human ingenuity, knowledge, and skills" (Jacobs 2004, p. 164). The concept's historical frame: "With the emergence of agriculture, the world was never again as it had previously been. Almost everywhere, the pristine economies and their cultures went down to defeat and memory loss" (p. 162); agrarianism then dominated "the goals of states and empires, shaping their politics, military ambitions, institutions, organizational abilities, fears, and beliefs," making "societies most successful at feeding their people… cultural winners and empire builders" (p. 162). "But that is no longer true… Now it is the turn of agrarianism to become a cultural loser. Though not everyone is well fed, the need to eat no longer dictates that most people, or even a high proportion in the West, must live on the land" (p. 162). The world displays "a previously unimaginable redundancy of idled breadbaskets" — Upstate New York, the Ottawa Valley, Argentina, Ukraine, Sicily, the prairie provinces — regions "became economic problems rather than solutions" (pp. 162–163).

The concept's political core: "No longer is territory a zero-sum possession of states and empires. Separations and other causes of territorial loss can be win-win events instead of reasons for war or precursors to poverty and failure" (p. 163) — with Germany and Japan as the proof cases: "Postagrarian states do not increase their wealth by aggrandizing territories and seizing lands and natural resources — as Japan and Germany learned after losing World War II and subsequently prospering by other means" (p. 164). "The key to postagrarian wealth is the complicated task of nurturing economic diversity, opportunity, and peace without resort to oppression" (p. 164). Human capital is not new — "its presence can be discerned in preagricultural Cro-Magnon cave art… Creativity and ability to accumulate skills and knowledge are inborn capacities of anatomically modern human beings, much as language is an inborn capacity" (p. 163) — what is new is that agrarian institutions can no longer harness it. Via Karen Armstrong, the concept explains modernization's disturbances: in all pre-modern societies "education was designed to put a brake on the ingenuity and curiosity of the individual," while the postagrarian West "expect[s] to know more than our parents' generation" (Armstrong, quoted p. 164); and the colonial transmission failure — modernization "inevitably superficial" when "a process that had taken Europe three centuries had to be achieved at top speed," leaving colonies "ruled by secular foreign law codes which they could not understand" and populations with "a sinking loss of identity" (Armstrong, quoted pp. 166–167). The jolts administered by Western empires and their joint organs "have already brought into being new Dark Ages, especially in such African countries as Rwanda, Liberia, Congo (Zaire), Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, as well as in Cambodia… and Burma" (p. 167). The concept's stakes for the West: the shift "is so jolting that if our culture and our contemporaries' pull through more or less intact, we will all deserve posterity's gratitude" (p. 25) — the postagrarian passage as the immediate context of the five-pillar decay.

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: agrarianism as the previous winner's economy; postagrarian wealth as ingenuity; territory's de-zero-summing (2004).
• Karen Armstrong (not yet paged — see log) — the historical machinery: education-as-brake in agrarian societies; modernization's colonial superficiality; Islam: A Short History (2000) as the source.
• Jared Diamond (not yet paged — see log) — the agriculture-origin frame (Guns, Germs and Steel) whose biogeographic account the postagrarian thesis supersedes as the present era's explanatory frame.
• Wendell Berry and the agrarian writers (not yet paged — see log) — the counter-vision Jacobs engages in her notes: the agrarian lament she respectfully reverses — "I placed myself imaginatively ten thousand years ago and pretended that what I was reading expressed the revulsion of former foragers toward the bondage of peasant life" (p. 221).

Related Concepts

• dark-age — the risk frame: postagrarian transition as the jolts that produce "new Dark Ages" in unprepared societies.
• import-replacing — the micro-mechanism: ingenuity-based city economies as what postagrarian wealth actually runs on.
• fortress-mentality — the reaction formation: agrarian societies' mythos retreat against modernization's jolts.
• vicious-spirals — the dynamic the transition perturbs: jolts to which "institutions cannot adapt adequately" become the losers' doom.
• densification — the settlement consequence: postagricultural land abundance ("3 to 4 percent of a population to produce food for the other 96 percent," p. 146) is what made sprawl's land withdrawals feasible.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the forager-to-agrarian precedent (pp. 161–162); the idled breadbaskets (pp. 162–163); the zero-sum reversal (p. 163); the ingenuity-based wealth thesis (p. 164); Armstrong's education-brake and colonial-modernization quotations (pp. 164–167); the new Dark Ages list (p. 167); the cultural mosaic of winners, climbers and the lost (p. 168); the Appalachian pocket and North Lawndale as Dark Age populations (p. 168); the agrarian-reader engagement in the notes (pp. 219–221).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; awaits economic-history sources on the post-industrial transition and the wiki's postfordism cluster as its economic neighborhood.

Open Questions

• Jacobs claims "No longer is territory a zero-sum possession" (p. 163). But the wiki's planetary-suburbanization and postmetropolitan sources document land competition continuing at metropolitan scale. Is the thesis about states, not land? What replaces territory as the object of inter-polity competition — and is it talent, which reintroduces rivalry in new form?
• Armstrong's colonial-modernization material gives the concept a dark symmetry: the West's own postagrarian transition was self-paced, the colonies' was forced. Does this make the concept a theory of timing — Dark Ages as what happens when the transition is administered faster than institutions can adapt (the "radical jolts" principle)?
• The concept implies agrarian cultures (not economies) remain the risk: fundamentalism as the agrarian worldview's defense. Does the wiki's consumption and everyday-life literature describe a postagrarian culture's own form of mythos — the spectacle, consumerist nostaligia — or does Jacobs's frame preclude extending the concept that far?