The most recent update was 7 September 2025
The Organisation and Management of Social Change.
Reference; Geddes and Grosset, Atlas of World History.
Quote -
The Infrastructure of change.
Population
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The population of Europe had been growing relentlessly since the time of the Black Death. (Ed. - around 1350) Demographers have argued why the increase was particularly pronounced in the sixteenth century. (Ed - around 1550) It appears as though women started marrying younger, and therefore having a longer child bearing life. But this leaves unanswered the question why such a social change should have occurred. The eighteenth century (Ed. – around 1750) again saw a steady increase across Europe, which predates major medical advances of the following century. A modest alleviation of the harsh conditions of rural life, the improvement of the housing stock and some advances in public health may all have contributed to a reduction in the death rate.
(Ed - The Black Death resulted in a significant depopulation throughout Europe. This enabled the Villeins and Serfs to escape the estates they were bonded to and walk along the roads until they were too far away to be recognised or found. They could then offer their services to estate owners who, desperate to find labour, employed them without too many questions and as free people.
Villeins and Serfs Escaped.
Thus the Villein and Serf system collapsed and the rural workers with better lives were able to repopulate the land in which much farmland left unfarmed had returned to wilderness. The social impact of the Black Death – unregulated and uncontrolled – does not seem to have been recognised by historians although it’s effects were very widespread across Europe and likely beyond. Similarly the social impact of modern TVs followed by VDUs in general has not been recognised or analysed and is also unregulated and uncontrolled. It’s ability to induce personal detachment from reality and mass hysteria is shown in the book ‘1984’ by George Orwell. Source of Info; Wikipedia)
Rulers generally welcomed a rising population; it provided a larger manpower pool for the military, and increased the tax base of the nation.
(Ed - however the impact of science in the form of contraceptions and abortions has resulted in a stabilisation or marked fall in populations across the world with the exception of Africa and the Middle East.)
In 1798 however an English clergyman, called Thomas Malthus, published his Essay on Population. The world, he argued, possesses limited resources. As population grows, so the most vulnerable - the poor - must inevitably experience disaster and hunger. Malthus’ work was influential but his warnings were not, in the short term, authenticated by events. The reason for this was that, at the same time that the population was increasing, Europe was experiencing an agricultural revolution, which greatly increased the amount of food available to meet the growing demand.
The Agricultural Revolutions
The first great change in agriculture practice came with the introduction of settled farming at the beginning of historical times. Even in Babylonian cities, farming families had to produce a surplus to feed craftsmen, priests, and warriors. By the beginning of the eighteenth century little had changed. It is estimated that in England eight out of ten people still lived in the countryside and that, on average, one farming family had to keep one other family from the produce of it’s land. People still ate bread baked from their own wheat and drank beer brewed from their own barley. Animals, except for breeding stock, were still slaughtered and salted down for the winter.
The second great change in agriculture practice originated in small highly urbanized seventeenth century Holland (Ed - around 1650). Holland farms had to be more efficient than those of their larger neighbours and major improvements were pioneered, particularly in the development of root vegetables, largely for animal winter feed, and in high yield artificial grasses, such as alfalfa (lucerne).
In the eighteenth century (Ed - around 1775) the English gentry, unlike their neighbours in France, lived on their estates, and it became fashionable to take an interest in farming. George III set the tone by contributing articles to a farming journal. Some began to introduce the Dutch innovations on their estates. New crops and methods of crop rotation were introduced and selective breeding produced remarkable improvements in the quality of livestock. (Ed - and crops)
These improvements could not be introduced without radical changes in the organization of the countryside. Improved agriculture could not be successfully introduced in the old communal fields, so enclosures, which had been taking place for two centuries, were given a new impetus. In the change from peasant holdings to larger farms, worked by landless labourers, many lost land and ancient rights. However the production of food became a much more efficient process. By the late eighteenth century (Ed – around 1780) British farmers were in a position to support a huge increase in the nation’s urban population.
Financial and Human Resources.
Any major economic expansion needs to be built on a sound financial base. Britain’s growing international trade brought prosperity, and it’s island position meant that wealth did not have to be dissipated on the maintenance of a large standing army. By the standards of the time, she also had a sophisticated and well capitalized banking industry.
It is harder to establish a link between the skills required for technological advance and the social and educational structure of the day. Few of the innovators of the new age came from the conventional academic background which had produced Isaac Newton. The innovators were more typically self-taught, or the products of Scottish or dissenting education.
Economic Theory
In 1776 Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, which laid the basis of modern economics. He argued the benefits of competition in a free economy, against both state control and the abuses of monopoly powers. His arguments were influential both in government and business circles, initially in Britain and later in the United States and elsewhere.
(Ed. - It represented a shift from previous economic thought by proposing that self-interest and the forces of supply and demand, rather than regulation, should determine economic activity. At the time of his writing, society was regulated by religion, but Smith presented the case for a selfish and greedy but motivated society that over-rode religious principles and produced an age of science and technology.)
Capital and Labour
Trade Unions
Throughout history, there has always been a sharp divide between the rich and the poor but the working people within the new factory system (Ed - as per the industrial revolution) became acutely aware of the polarization between those who owned the means of production and their employees. By gathering workers together in large units of production, the owners made it practicable for them to organize in defence of their living conditions.
Robert Owen, a working man turned successful cotton master, attempted to establish a model industrial society at New Lanark, Scotland; he introduced schools and all kinds of leisure activities for the working people and still was able to show a profit for the mill. He became dissatisfied with this paternalistic approach and set up a cooperative venture in Hew Harmony in America (Ed. - the USA). This proved less successful and he returned to Britain, where he founded the ambitious Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. This was a bid to harness the power of the working people, so that they could control the industries in which they worked. Owen’s union failed, as did most of the early attempts to organize labour. Unskilled workers, faced by organized management, lacked credible bargaining power. Over much of Europe, they were further weakened by being divided between opposing Christian and socialist unions.
The battle between capital and labour could be seen in its rawest state in the USA. The owners mobilized city and state authorities and hired private armies to break strikes. Also there were as yet no antitrust laws to prevent employers from combining to achieve their objectives. The workers responded by organizing themselves into violent secret societies, like the Molly MacGuires of the Pennsylvania coal mines. At Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead works at Pittsburgh in 1892 the two sides confronted each other in pitched battle.
At Homestead works, as elsewhere, management emerged victorious because there was always unskilled labour on hand to fill the jobs of those who went on strike. At the end of the century, however, there emerged a new generation of union leaders who recognized that progress could best be made by organizing the skilled labour that was now vital for the more sophisticated industries. In the United States, in 1886, Samuel Gompers organized these skilled trades into the more successful ‘American Federation of Labour’. In the years that followed, the rights of organized labour were increasingly recognized by the legal systems of the industrialized nations.
(Ed. - With reference to Trade Unions, the right of workers to bargain collectively with employers about pay and conditions was not easily obtained. In Britain from 1799 to 1824 it was illegal to join a trade union. Punishments were very harsh and in 1864 six men of Tolpuddle in Dorset, Britain, who formed a trade union, were transported and sent as convicts to Australia, where they expected to serve long sentences as virtual serfs. Gradually the unions gained great political importance and the evil conditions of the early factories are not today, in 2025, possible.)
Socialism
(Ed. Definition - Socialism is generally regarded as any economic or political system based on the governing authority’s ownership and control of important businesses and methods of production. A further and more extreme definition states that Socialism is an economic political and social system that is based on the belief that all people are equal and should share equally in a society’s wealth. Another definition regards Socialism as a political and economic ideology that has significantly shaped the modern world. Rooted in the ideas of equality and justice, Socialism is a system where wealth and resources are distributed more equally, ensuring everyone has access to basic needs and opportunities. A principle of to each according to their contribution has also been quoted. This concept, developed in the 19th century, disagrees with capitalist systems that are designed for individual ownership and profit.
This lack of a clear definition makes Socialism a difficult subject to understand and causes considerable disagreement.
An analogy might be made between societies’ organisation and that of farming. It should be noted that civilization as we know it today began with settled farming, so the analogy is a relevant one. A capitalist society can be regarded as a hunter-gather one based on jungle law, involving a motivating survival of the fittest, while a socialist society is more of a settled farming one based on organisation and management, involving discipline, unity and regulation. As both systems appear to have advantages and disadvantages perhaps an optimum would be to have a combination of the two, which is what Britain today appears to have. )
During the time that Robert Owen was experimenting with new structures, continental thinkers were beginning to challenge the ‘laissez-faire’ (Ed - ‘lazy life’) theories of Adam Smith. Most influential was the French nobleman Claude de Saint-Simon, often looked on as the founder of socialism, who published his critique for the new industrial age in the 1820s. He argued for the replacement of the existing ruling ‘elite’ by a ‘meritocracy’ which would manage the economy for the general good of the population, rather than for individual gain.
(Ed. ‘Elite’ - a select group or class. ‘Meritocracy’ - government by persons selected competitively according to merit.)
Saint-Simon’s ideas gained ground in France. In 1848 Paris experienced two distinct revolutions. The first unseated the king, the second was a bloody confrontation between workers, proclaiming the new socialists ideas, and the bourgeoisie, who defended traditional property rights.
Communism
(Ed. Definition - a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war that will lead to a society in which all property is publically owned and each person is paid and works according to their needs and abilities.)
Karl Marx, in his prime.
Karl Marx watched the destruction of the Paris workers in 1848 with distress but without surprise. He had been associated with the revolutionary movement in his native Germany before being forced into exile. He believed that history showed two struggles. The first, as in all earlier revolutions, had been between the feudal authorities and the bourgeoisie.
(Ed. The feudal system in medieval Europe was whereby a vassal held land from a superior in exchange for allegiance and service.
Bourgeoisie refers to the capitalist class.
Thus the feudal system was based on an aristocratic society whereas the bourgeoisie (capitalist) system is based on a monetarist society. )
The second, in his own day, lay between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
( Ed. The proletariat refers to wage earners especially those without capital and dependent on selling their labour. )
Marx held that the value of goods lay in the labour that had been expended in its production, and the interests of the proletariat lay in winning a fair return for that labour. That was in conflict with the interests of the owners, or bourgeoisie, who were dedicated to achieving a profit on the product. Within a capitalist society the proletariat was therefore alienated from the owners and both sides were inevitably locked in class war. The objective for the proletariat was to win control of the machinery of government by revolution, and then to use the new communist state to control the ‘commanding heights of the economy’ - land, transport, factories, and banks.
Marx and his friends tried to gather the revolutionary movement into a unity without which he believed it could never be effective. In 1864 the first international meeting of the Communist party was held in London, with delegations from France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Poland, as well as Britain. The party, however, quickly showed it’s capacity for splitting into factions.
The Communist Party Unity
United by their Loyal Women
When, by the beginning of the next century, none of the great industrial nations had fallen, many thought that the communist challenge had passed away. It was not anticipated that the revolution would come in Russia which, under Marx’s definition, still lay within the feudal stage of development.
Unquote.
Reference; Geddes and Grosset, Atlas of World History.
The Major Three Variables in a Changing World.
The Role of Religion in the Organisation and Management of Society
(Ed. Definition - religion, the belief in a superhuman controlling power, especially in a personal God or gods entitled to obedience and worship. Source; The Concise Oxford Dictionary 1990)
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