A Thought Experiment in De-Industrialization

The View from Oregon – 345: Friday 13 June 2025

Almost ten years ago I wrote a blog post titled Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as Its Central Project, in which I considered the possibility of an essentially agricultural civilization that nevertheless continues to develop its scientific capacities. I’ve often thought of returning to this idea and writing it out in more detail, since I still find the scenario to be intrinsically interesting. This thought experiment was partly suggested to me by the Morgenthau Plan, which I’ve written about on several occasions (although not recently), in particular in “The Stalin Doctrine” (from more than ten years ago). The Morgenthau Plan was a proposed de-industrialization of Germany after the Second World War so that it could never again wage industrialized warfare. Of the Ruhr the Morgenthau Plan stipulated, “This area should not only be stripped of all presently existing industries but so weakened and controlled that it cannot in the foreseeable future become an industrial area.” This was to be accomplished by the actual removal and destruction of industry: “…all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action shall either be completely dismantled and removed from the area or completely destroyed.”

De-industrialization has now become a political charge. In the immediate aftermath of the war the Allies were occasionally accused of carrying out the Morgenthau Plan, so it was a political charge back then as well. Its current use is more subtle, but having become a political charge has made it almost worthless as a descriptor, which is unfortunate because it would be useful to have a term to describe de-industrialization. We can think of de-industrialization as a policy imposed on a defeated enemy (as with the Morgenthau Plan) or upon an uncomprehending population by hostile elites, or we can think of de-industrialization as a natural economic process that occurs when a previously industrialized economy transitions away from manufacturing to services, which could in turn be an economy climbing up the value-added ladder by transitioning industries like banking and financial services, but it could also be the dead end of an industrialized economy, descending the value-added ladder, when industries are off-shored and the native population subsist in meaningless and marginal service sector jobs.

In any case, my thought experiment was an attempt to imagine a post-Morgenthau Plan Germany in which heavy industry is effectively absent, but there is no explicit limit placed on science and science education, even though science could not be pursued in a de-industrialized economy after the manner of “big science” that involves multi-billion dollar experimental designs. In a social and economic context of this kind there would be an incentive to find ways to do things at a smaller scale. If we imagine such a society as having access to scientific knowledge apart from or prior to its abandonment of industrialization—it could receive journals from societies in which big science continued, or it could refer to its own scientific efforts prior to de-industrialization—scientific work could go on attempting both to reproduce the results of big science on a smaller scale and to extend scientific knowledge. Doing experiments at a smaller scale could well summon creativity in which scientific knowledge is extended in surprising and unexpected ways, not just in reproducing past results, but in refocusing efforts away from big science to small science.

There is a parallel for this in formal thought. There is a de facto research program inherent in constructivism to assess the results of classical mathematics from a constructivist perspective. Many traditional proofs employed non-constructive methods, which makes them suspect from a constructivist perspective. The implicit research program is to subject the entire body of traditional mathematics to constructivist scrutiny (or, if you like, constructivist reconstruction), which sometimes means abandoning traditional theorems, sometimes means using alternative theorems, and sometimes means finding a constructivist proof for a result previously obtained by non-constructive methods.

The small-scale science possible within an essentially agricultural economy would similarly involve an implicit research program of finding small-scale means to demonstrate knowledge that had previously been arrived at through large-scale methods. This would mean, analogous to the above parallel with formal thought, sometimes abandoning a large-scale result, sometimes employing an alternative result (something “close enough” to a traditional formulation), and sometimes finding a small-scale way to demonstrate results previously obtained by large-scale methods. How much of science once produced by a worldwide research industry could be reproduced on a benchtop? This would be one question such a society would be implicitly challenged to answer.

I have argued elsewhere that an industrialized economy involves a cycle in which science produces new technologies, technologies are engineered into industries, and industries produce (among other things) new and more sophisticated scientific instruments that in turn facilitate the expansion and extension of science, and so on from science to technology to engineering, around and around again. I call this the STEM cycle. But in the kind of society I have attempted to describe, the STEM cycle wouldn’t function as it has functioned since the industrial revolution. Would it function in a different way, or would it cease to function? In other words, would an agricultural society that maintained scientific research make the transition from a tightly-coupled STEM cycle (of a conventional industrial economy) to a loosely-coupled STEM cycle (characteristic of an agricultural civilization)?

I can imagine, parallel to the shift to small-scale science, a shift to small-scale technology, so the STEM cycle might continue in a changed form—a small-scale STEM cycle in which small-scale science yielded small-scale technologies, and these small-scale technologies could be engineered into better scientific instruments. I can further imagine that if this modified STEM cycle came into being, that it would be more tightly focused on science than the conventional STEM cycle. Since the incentive to scale up industrial production to serve a consumer market would not be there, it would be the same scientists pursuing the science who would also be building the technology and engineering better scientific instruments with this newly developed technology. As with implicit small-scale research program, there would be an attempt to see what technological capacities and scientific instruments could be produced on a smaller scale, and, again, there would be the possibility that this limitation would drive creativity. However, that creativity would be channeled through different institutions and the result would likely be different.

Other than the Morgenthau Plan, another influence on this thought experiment is the classic 1955 novel by Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow. This is a post-apocalyptical tale in which, in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the US Constitution is amended to forbid more than a thousand persons or two hundred buildings in a square mile. I read this book when I was still quite young, and it stays with me even today (I mentioned this recently in Comparative Literatures of the Apocalypse). One of the things I liked about the way the story was constructed was that the formal institution of the Constitution did not explicitly forbid technology (or science, for that matter), but the informal institutions shown to grow up around this formalized version of limits to growth were anti-technology; one of the motivations for my thought experiment was to ask myself what informal institutions would grow up in the midst of de-industrialization. If we read history carefully we can find many instances in which a formal institution is coupled to an informal institution (or institutions), and the driving force of the informal institutions has unintended consequences.

Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which appeared four years after The Long Tomorrow in 1959, also involves society turning against technology, but in this novel the proscription on technology (the “Great Simplification”) is explicit and bound up with a process that we could call de-industrialization pursued for ideological reasons (unlike the pragmatic motivation of the Morgenthau Plan). In both novels, a nuclear war is the trigger for social change, and we could think of this as the ultimate embodiment of technologically-forced social change. As I have remarked many times, technology has forced social change throughout history, even when societies are resistant to social change and have attempted to build resistance to change into their social institutions. We can think of the industrial revolution as constructive social change, where “constructive” here refers only to the fact that new forces are being introduced into society, while on the other hand we can think of a disaster like nuclear war as destructive social change, in which technology violently intervenes in history only as a negative force.

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