Primitive Culture and Modernism

Introduction

The social and economic processes associated with modernization developed unevenly and over a long period. France was among the pioneers of industrialization in the nineteenth century, but both peasant agriculture and small business remained important sectors in the French economy well into the twentieth century.

Between 1945 and 1975, France was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, its average gross domestic product growth of 6.8 percent being exceeded only by those of West Germany and Japan. Hence the label “les trente glorie uses,” coined for this period by one of the architects and ideologues of the new social and economic model, Jean Fourastié. French post-war economic growth was stimulated by a number of more or less simultaneous developments.

First, a vital stimulus was provided by the money and managerial methods exported from the United States to France under the Marshall Plan (1947-1952) and by the continuing expansion of American firms and capital into France thereafter. World War II had consolidated the dominant position of the United States in the Atlantic economy, increasing Europe's dependency on American money and military might (Bauman, pp.6).

For this paper, we shall be covering the whereabouts of how far and wide have societies groomed and molded with reference to the primitive cultures that we have today. Also we must understand that how global pressures and changes that have changed the overall societies, both primitive and modern to have existed in the world and that we know of today.

Discussion

As Europe divided into blocs during the cold war, bolstering capitalism in Western countries such as France became an important U.S. policy objective. The French state was also instrumental in fostering economic growth, directing it from above through planning agencies that promoted strategic investment in infrastructure and technology. Population growth, encouraged by the state through family allowances and the recruitment of immigrant workers, contributed further to economic expansion in this period. The population grew from just under 40 million at the liberation to 50 million by 1969, providing an expanding pool of consumers and producers, particularly in the 1960s, when immigration was at its height and the initial wave of post-war babies reached adulthood (Brown, pp.385).

At the same time, the population was shifting rapidly from the countryside to the towns, so that by 1968 more than 66 percent of people lived in urban areas, compared to only 46 percent in 1946. The new economy implied changes in class structure, gender identities, and social habits. Technological advances and the implementation of new forms of managerial intervention created demand for increasing numbers of technicians, engineers, and management professionals in French industry. This, combined with the growth of the tertiary sector and the extended state bureaucracy required to support new forms of economic intervention and social welfare, produced a type of middle class defined less by inherited status and more by technical competence—or at least by the ability to turn the former into the latter. Kristin Ross has noted how the figure of the jeune ...