Sp ch 28 prt 4

837-847

Postwar Society and Culture in the Western World

I. During the postwar era, Western society and culture witnessed remarkably rapid change.
The rapid changes in postwar society, fueled by scientific advances and economic
growth, led many to view it as a new society.
The Structure of European Society
I. The structure of European society was altered after 1945. Especially noticeable were the
changes in the middle class.
A. Such traditional middle-class groups as business people and professionals in law,
medicine, and the universities were greatly augmented by a new group of managers
and technicians as large companies and government agencies employed increasing
numbers of white-collar supervisory and administrative personnel.
B. In both Eastern and Western Europe, the new managers and experts were very much
alike. Everywhere their positions depended on specialized knowledge acquired from
some form of higher education.
C. Everywhere they focused on the effective administration of their organizations. B/c
their positions usually depended on their skills, they took steps to ensure that their
own children would be educated.
A Society of Consumers
I. Changes also occurred among the traditional lower classes. Especially noticeable was the
dramatic shift of people from rural to urban areas.
A. The number of people working in agriculture, yet the size of the industrialized labor
force remained the same.
B. At the same time, a substantial increase in real wages enabled the working classes to
aspire to the consumption patterns of the middle class, leading to what some have
called the consumer society.
C. Buying on the installment plan, introduced in the 1930s, became widespread in the
1950s and gave workers a chance to imitate the middle class by buying such
products as televisions, vacuum cleaners, and stereos. But the most visible symbol of
mass consumerism was the automobile.
Mass Leisure
I. Rising incomes, combined w/shorter working hours, created an even greater market for
mass leisure activities.
A. B/w 1900 and 1960, the workweek was reduced from 60 to 40 hours, and the number
of paid holidays increased.
B. All aspects of popular culture—music, holidays, sports, media—became
commercialized and offered opportunities for leisure activities, including concerts,
sporting events, and television viewing.
II. Another visible of mass leisure was the growth of mass tourism.
A. After the war, the combination of more vacation time, increased prosperity, and the
flexibility provided by package tours w/their lower rates and less expensive lodgings
enabled millions to expand their travel possibilities.
Creation of the Welfare State
I. One of the most noticeable social developments in postwar Europe was the creation of
the welfare state.
A. In one sense, the welfare state represents another extension of the power of the state
over the lives of its citizens, a process that had increased dramatically as a result of
the 2 world wars.
B. The goal of the welfare state was to make it possible for people to live better and
more meaningful lives. Advocates of the welfare state believed that eliminating
poverty and homelessness, providing medical service for all, ensuring dignity for
older people, and extending educational opportunities for all who wanted them
would free people to achieve happiness by satisfying their material needs.
 II. Social welfare schemes were not new to Europe. Beginning in the late 19thc, some states
had provided welfare for the working class by instituting old-age pensions, medical
insurance, and unemployment compensation.
A. These efforts were piecemeal and were by no means based on a general belief that
society had a responsibility to care for all of its citizens.
III. The new postwar social legislation generally extended earlier benefits and created new
ones as well. In many countries, already existing benefits for sickness, accidents,
unemployment, and old age were simply extended to cover more people and provide
larger payments.
IV. Affordable health care for all people was another goal of the welfare state, although the
methods of achieving this goal varied.
A. In some countries, medical care was free to all people w/some kind of insurance, but
in others, people had to contribute toward the cost of their medical care.
V. Another feature of welfare states was the use of family allowances, which were instituted
in some countries to provide a minimum level of material care for children.
A. Most family allowance programs provided a fixed amount per child. Family
allowances were also conceived in large part to increase the population as a result of
population decline suffered during the war.
VI. Welfare states also sought to remove class barriers to opportunity by expanding the
number of universities and providing scholarship aid to allow everyone to attend these
institutions.
A. Overall, European states moved toward free tuition or modest fees for university
attendance.
VII. The welfare state dramatically increased the amount of money states expended on social
services. Most people favored the benefits, and most leaders were well aware that it was
political suicide to advocate curtailing or seriously lowering those benefits.
Gender Issues in the Welfare State
I. Gender issues also influenced the form that the welfare state took in different countries.
One general question dominated the debate: Should women be recognized in a special
category as mothers, or should they be regarded as individuals?
A. The British welfare system was based on the belief that women should stay home
w/their children: women received subsidies for children, but married women who
worked were given few or no benefits.
B. Employers were also encouraged to pay women lower wages to discourage them
from joining the workforce. Thus the British welfare system encouraged the
dependence of wives on their husbands.
C. The Western German government passed laws that discouraged women from
working. In keeping women at home, West Germany sought to differentiate itself
from Communist countries in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where women
were encouraged to work outside the home.
D. At the same time, to help working women raise families, Communist governments
also provided daycare facilities, as well as family subsidies and maternity benefits.
II. France sought to maintain the individual rights of women in its welfare system. The
French government recognized women as equal to men and thus as entitled to the same
welfare benefits as men for working outside the home.
A. At the same time, wanting to encourage population growth, the government provided
incentives for women to stay home and bear children as well as daycare and after-
school programs for working mothers.
Women in the Postwar Western World
I. Despite their enormous contributions to the war effort, women were removed from the
workforce at the end of WWII to provide jobs for the soldiers returning home.
A. After the horrors to war, people seemed willing for a while to return to traditional
family practices. Female participation in the workforce declined, and birthrates
began to grow, creating a “baby boom.”
 B. This increase in the birthrate did not last, however, and birthrates, and thus the size
of families, began to decline by the end of the 1950s. Largely responsible for this
decline was the widespread practice of birth control.
Women in the Workforce
I. The trend toward smaller families no doubt contributed to the change in the character of
women’s employment in both Europe and the US as women experienced considerably
more years when they were not involved in raising children.
A. The most important development was the increased number of married women in the
workforce.
II. But the increased number of women in the workforce did not change some old patterns.
A. Working class women in particular still earned salaries lower than those of men for
equal work. In addition, women still tended to enter traditionally female jobs.
B. Many European women also still faced the double burden of earning income and
raising a family. Such inequities led increasing numbers of women to rebel.
The Feminist Movement: The Search for Liberation
I. The participation of women in the 2 world wars helped them achieve one of their major
aims in the 19thc women’s movement—the right to vote.
A. Already after WWI, many governments acknowledged the contributions of women
to the war effort by granting them suffrage.
B. After WWII, European women tended to fall back into the traditional roles expected
of them, and little else was heard of feminist concerns.
C. By the late 1960s, women began to assert their rights again and speak as feminists.
Along w/the student upheavals of the late 1960s came renewed interest in feminism,
or the women’s liberation movement.
D. Increasingly, women protested that the acquisition of political and legal equality had
not brought true equality w/men.
The Permissive Society
I. The permissive society was a label used by critics to describe the new society of postwar
Europe.
A. WWI had opened the 1st significant crack in the rigid code of manners and morals of
the 19thc.
B. The 1920s had witnessed experimentation of drugs, the appearance of pornography,
and new sexual freedom. But these indications of a new attitude appeared mostly in
major cities and touched only small numbers of people.
C. After WWII, changes in manners and morals were far more extensive and far more
noticeable.
II. Sweden took the lead in the propagation of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the
rest of Europe and the US soon followed.
A. Sex education in the schools and the decriminalization of homosexuality were but 2
aspects of Sweden’s liberal legislation.
B. The introduction of the birth control pill, which became largely available by the mid-
1960s, gave people more freedom in sexual behavior.
III. The new standards were evident in the breakdown of the traditional family.
A. Divorce rates increased dramatically, especially in the 1960s, and premarital and
extramarital sexual experiences rose substantially.
IV. The decade of the 1960s also saw the emergence of a drug culture.
A. New attitudes toward sex and the use of drugs were only 2 manifestations of a
growing youth movement in the 1960s that questioned authority and fostered
rebellion against the older generation.
B. Spurred on by the Vietnam war and a growing political consciousness, the youth
rebellion became a youth protest movement by the 2nd ½ of the 1960s.
Education and Student Revolt
I. B/f WWII, higher education had largely remained the preserve of Europe’s wealthier
classes. After the war, European states began to foster greater equality of opportunity in
 higher education by reducing or eliminating fees, and universities experienced an influx
of students from the middle and lower classes.
II. But there were problems. Classrooms w/too many students, professors who paid little
attention to their students, and administrators who acted in an authoritarian fashion led to
student resentment.
A. In addition, despite changes in the curriculum, students often felt that the universities
were not providing an education relevant to the realities of the modern age.
B. This discontent led to an outburst of student revolts in the late 1960s. In part, these
protests were an extension of the spontaneous disruptions in American universities in
the mid-1960s, which were often sparked by student opposition to the Vietnam war.
C. The most famous student revolt occurred in France in 1968. It erupted at the
university of Nanterre and soon spread to the Sorbonne. French students demanded a
greater voice in the administration of the university, took over buildings, and then
expanded the scale of their protests by inviting workers to support them.
III. The French revolt spurred protests elsewhere in Europe, although none of them
succeeded in becoming mass movements.
A. In West Berlin, university students led a protest against Axel Springer, leader of
Germany’s largest newspaper establishment. Many German students were motivated
by a desire to destroy what they considered to be the corrupt old order and were
especially influenced by the ideas of Herbert Marcuse.
B. Marcuse argued that capitalism had undermined the dissatisfaction of the oppressed
masses by encouraging the consumption of material things. He proposed that a small
cadre of unindoctrinated students could liberate the masses from the control of the
capitalist ruling class.
C. The German students’ attempt at revolutionary violence backfired as angry Berliners
supported police repression of the students.
IV. The student protest movement reached its high point in 1968, although scattered incidents
lasted until 1970.
A. There were several reasons for student radicalism. Some students were genuinely
motivated by the desire to reform the university. Others were protesting the Vietnam
war, which they viewed as a product of Western imperialism.
B. They also attacked other aspects of Western society, such as its materialism, and
expressed concern about becoming cogs in the large and impersonal bureaucratic
machine. For many students, the calls for democratic decision making w/I the
universities were a reflection of their deeper concerns about the direction of Western
society.
Postwar Art and Literature
I. Many artists and writers struggled to understand the horrors of WWII.
Art
I. Jean Dubuffet was a French artist who adopted an intentionally raw style of art to depict
the atrocities wrought by global conflict and genocide.
A. Dubuffet consciously rejected notions of beauty to capture the effects of war.
B. Borrowing from the art of children and the psychologically distressed, Dubuffet
developed Art Brut a gritty style that suggested no formal training.
II. Although Dubuffet remained in Paris during the war years, many artists and writers fled
to the US to avoid persecution for their revolutionary ideas.
A. Following the war, the US dominated the art world, as much as it did the world of
popular culture.
B. One of the styles that became synonymous w/the emergence of the New York art
scene was Abstract Expressionism.
III. Abstract Expressionism was energetic and spontaneous, qualities evident in the enormous
canvases of Jackson Pollock.
IV. The 1950s and early 1960s saw the emergence of Pop Art, which took images of popular
culture and transformed them into works of fine art.
 A. Several British art students, known as the Independent Group, incorporated science
fiction and American advertising techniques into their exhibitions.
B. “This Time Tomorrow” was the group’s crowning achievement, an exhibit held in
1956 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. This display featured environments
inspired by advertisements as well as mural-sized reproductions of movie characters.
V. Andy Warhol, who began as an advertising illustrator, became the most famous of the
American Pop artists.
A. Warhol adapted images from commercial art and photographs of celebrities.
B. Derived from mass culture, these works were mass-produced and deliberately “of the
moment,” expressing the fleeting whims of popular culture.
Literature
I. The most significant trend in postwar literature was called the “Theater of the Absurd.”
This new convention in drama began in France in the 1950s, although its most famous
proponent was Samuel Beckett.
A. Unlike traditional theater, suspense is maintained not by having the audience wonder
what is going to happen next but having them ask, what is happening now?
II. The Theater of the Absurd reflected its time. The postwar period was a time of
disillusionment w/ideological beliefs in politics or religion.
A. A sense of the world’s meaninglessness underscored the desolate worldview of
absurdist drama and literature.
The Philosophical Dilemma: Existentialism
I. The sense of meaningless that inspired the Theater of the Absurd also underscored the
philosophy of existentialism. It was born largely of the desperation caused by 2 world
wars and the breakdown of traditional values.
A. Existentialism reflected the anxieties of the 20thc and became especially well known
after WWII through the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
II. The central point of the existentialism of Sartre and Camus was the absence of God in the
universe.
A. The death of God, though tragic, meant that humans had no preordained destiny and
were alone in the universe, which had no future or hope.
B. According to Camus, the world was absurd and w/o meaning; humans, too, are w/o
meaning and purpose. Reduced to despair and depression, humans have but one
source of hope—themselves.
III. Though the world might be absurd, Camus argued, it could not be absurd unless people
judged it to be so.
A. People are quite unique in the world, and their kind of being is quite different from
all others. Humans are beings who 1st exist and then define themselves. They
determine what they will be.
B. People, then, must take full responsibility for what they are. They create their values
and give their lives meaning. And this can only be done by their involvement in life.
Only thorough one’s acts can one determine one’s values.
IV. Existentialism, therefore, involved an ethics of action, of involvement in life.
A. But people could not define themselves w/o their involvement w/others.
B. Thus existentialism’s ethical message was just as important as its philosophy of
being.
C. Essentially, the message of existentialism was one of authenticity. Individuals true to
themselves refused to be depersonalized by their society.
The Revival of Religion
I. Existentialism was one response to the despair generated by the apparent collapse of
civilized values in the 20thc. The revival of religion was another.
A. Ever since the Enlightenment of the 18thc, Christianity and religion had been on the
defensive. But a number of religious thinkers and leaders attempted to bring new life
to Christianity in the 20thc.
 II. One expression of this religious revival was the attempt of such theologians as Karl Barth
and Karl Rahner to infuse traditional Christian teachings w/new life.
A. In numerous writings, Barth attempted to reinterpret the religious insights of the
Reformation era for the modern world. To Barth, the sinful and hence imperfect
nature of human beings meant that humans could know religious truth not through
reason but only through the grace of God.
B. Rahner attempted to revitalize traditional Catholic theology by incorporating aspects
of modern thought. He was careful, however, to emphasize the continuity b/w
ancient and modern interpretations of the Catholic doctrine.
The Explosion of Popular Culture
I. Since WWII, popular culture has played an increasingly important role in helping
Western people define themselves. At one level, popular culture is but the history of the
ever-changing whims of mass taste, but on another level, “it is a history of how modern
society has created images of itself and expressed its fantasies, its fears, its ambitions.”
Culture as a Consumer Commodity
I. The history of popular culture is also the history of the economic system that supports it,
for this system manufactures, distributes, and sells the images that people consume as
popular culture. As popular culture and its economic support system become increasingly
intertwined, industries of leisure emerge.
A. Modern popular culture is therefore inextricably tied to the mass consumer society in
which it has emerged.
The Americaniztion of the World
I. The US has been the most influential force in shaping popular culture in the West and, to
a lesser degree, the rest of the world.
A. Through movies, advertising, music, and television, the US has spread its particular
form of consumerism to millions around the world.
II. Motion pictures were the primary vehicle for the diffusion of American popular culture in
the years immediately following the war, and they continued to dominate both European
and American markets in the next decades.
A. Nevertheless, the existence of a profitable art-house circuit in America and Europe
enabled European filmmakers to make films whose themes and avant-garde methods
were quite different from that of Hollywood.
III. Although developed in the 1930s, television did not become readily available until the
late 1940s.
A. In the 1960s, as television spread around the world, American networks unloaded
their products on Europe and the Third World at extraordinarily low prices.
IV. The US has dominated popular music since the end of WWII.