The industrial question is on the agenda everywhere: in the United States, the new “Inflation Reduction Act” has made it a strategic priority since 2023, and in China, it is the stated goal for celebrating the centenary of the revolution in 2049. Caught in a vice between the two, Europe is debating in outdated terms of deindustrialization and reindustrialization. Paradoxically, Europe, which invented the foundational worldview of industrialization, ignores its own origin story and imagines itself as “a post-industrial society.”
The genealogy of the word “industry” highlights continuous expansions of its meaning: from individual skill to a profession, to a company and a business sector, all the way to “society,” or even “industrial civilization.” Despite its polysemy, after the Second World War, industry was reduced to its technical and economic dimension.
The British statistician Colin Clark made it one of the sectors of the economy. Jean Fourastié associated this approach with a kind of “three-sector theory” according to which the main activity of an economy should “progress” from primary to secondary and culminate in tertiary. An economy and a country would be more “developed” the more the tertiary sector was… This assumes “a law of progress.” As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted, “reading this, one gets the feeling of all societies moving along the same road and toward a single goal.”
Widespread Digitalization
But this classification persists in people’s minds and in official nomenclatures. Yet it is an obstacle to understanding industrial transformations and even prevents defining a so-called “industrial” perimeter. Indeed, contemporary industry is marked by widespread and accelerated digitalization and by its hybridization with services. Most companies outsource numerous activities while simultaneously producing new uses or experiences, and not just manufactured products.