ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the reality than on the theory of industrial society and examines the implications of the initial theoretical decision to describe modern societies as fundamentally industrial. The industrial revolution came to stand for the fragmentation of society and the dehumanisation of man, the poverty and ugliness of proletarian life, the spirit of disenchanted calculation and crass commercialism. Beyond the limited confines of academic discourse, the classical image of industrial society has played an important role in structuring contemporary social identity and political programmes. The image of industrial society, to the extent that it actively promotes such a view, severely restricts the social imagination. Yet the influence of the image of industrial society is even wider than its support of the more extreme technocratic and technophobic approaches to economic progress.
