This article is a lightly edited translation of a chapter from Extrême droite: la résistible ascension (Éditions Amsterdam, 2024), edited by Ugo Palheta for the Institut La Boétie book series).
In both the public arena and debates among scholars, the rise of neoliberal forms of employment is often recognized as a force that has destabilized the structures of representation. For sociologists from a wide range of theoretical backgrounds, job insecurity, combined with the subjection of the workforce to ever more intense competition, is undermining European democracies themselves. Robert Castel, for example, emphasizes the political effects that the decline of the Fordist model has had:
An employment condition steeped in rights had become the main sociological basis of the possibility of a generalized citizenship both for the worker and their beneficiaries [or, as French literally calls the worker’s dependents, ayants droits, “rightful claimants”]. As a result, the destabilization of this bedrock risks undermining the conditions of access to social citizenship, and no doubt citizenship in general.
In societies where Fordist-era norms once provided the foundations of democracy, the spreading experience of precarity has compelled sociologists to examine the electoral fallout of this shift. In France, the debate has especially focused on the vote for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (previously the Front National), with some commentators and social scientists believing that its electoral progress is fed by the weakening of working-class people’s status at work.
This narrative of political change is based on the perception of a concomitant rise in neoliberal policies (especially insofar as…
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Auteur: Yann Le Lann
