“Social scientists of the past spoke glibly of an "agricultural revolution," a time during which human populations suddenly soared”

—  Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: Social scientists of the past spoke glibly of an "agricultural revolution," a time during which human populations suddenly soared, cities were founded, and many trappings of civilization made their appearance.... The food-production revolution turns out to be a slow evolution, a long period of experimentation rather than a sudden explosion.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Social scientists of the past spoke glibly of an "agricultural revolution," a time during which human populations sudde…" by Peter Farb?
Peter Farb photo
Peter Farb 92
American academic and writer 1929–1980

Related quotes

Peter F. Drucker photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“Conclusion: Because humanity has entered a new era of science and industry, Ecumenopolis is as inevitable as the village after the agricultural revolution.”

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1914–1975) Greek architect

Source: Building Entopia - 1975, Chapter 1, Ecumenopolis, p. 19

Nicholas Wade photo
Robert Peel photo

“If you had to constitute new societies, you might on moral and social grounds prefer cornfields to cotton factories, an agricultural to a manufacturing population. But our lot is cast, and we cannot recede.”

Robert Peel (1788–1850) British Conservative statesman

Letter to J. W. Croker (27 July 1842).
Charles Stuart Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel from His Private Papers. Volume II (London: John Murray, 1899), p. 529.

H. G. Wells photo

“There has been … an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years.”

Preface, p. xiii
World Brain (1938)
Context: There has been … an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems.

Vikram Sarabhai photo
Rosa Luxemburg photo

“War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

"In the Storm" in Le Socialiste http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/05/01.htm as translated by Mitch Abidor (1 - 8 May 1904)
Context: The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics.
And its in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm.
The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world – this world of economic, political and social fetishism – constantly wraps us in.
The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these “statesmen” or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence.
War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.

Jacob Bronowski photo

Related topics