Social policy towards the family: Socialization or the end of a historic form?

Abstract

Intensive development of socialist society, which started immediately after Second World War, proceeded simultaneously on two mutually conditional tracks: on material and ideological. In certain way, both were based on the critique of traditional social concept: starting from its economic and all the way to value characteristics under all encompassing parole of modernization. The policy of transformation was mostly based on certain number of dichotomies that expressed the difference between past and preferred social forms and contents. Past, which was defined as old, regressive, conservative, patriarchal, alienated should be replaced by preferred, that is, by new, progressive, modern, egalitarian, democratic, free... The mainstay of the past was village, agrarian family, while the mainstay of the preferred was, as it appeared later, urban type family. Modernization implied economic restructuring of the state through the process of intensive industrialization and consequently, urbanization while non-material discourse of changes was dominated by the idea of democratization of society, that is, a specific ideology of freedom that had to be won on all instances of social reality. In-alienation of society was proclaimed as the highest ideal of the new order, which should be achieved by the emancipation of its members from all types of coercion-from work, through moral and up to religious coercion. Even though there is a prevailing viewpoint in scientific literature about the conditionality of social transformations by economic and technological factors and progress, I think that it can be rightly said that this process was primarily of spiritual nature, that is, that its main mover and trigger was the process of atheism of the society. Development of modern society (not only in Serbia) meant in fact its de-Christianization and secularization, where freedom from God and coercions contained in the religious view of the world became precondition for accepting all others.