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Political Theory
This book by the distinguished French sociologist Alain Touraine grows out from and rests firmly in the context of French political culture. Nevertheless the topic resonates well with the concerns of a British academic audience, not least because he attacks in the latter part of the book the incoherence and ideological drift of the ‘Third Way’ propagated across Europe by Blair and Schroeder.
Conventional responses to modernity have taken, so Touraine says, mainly two forms: neoliberalism (the invitation to surrender politics to the forces of the market) or state management (by which the author means more than just state regulations but the peculiar form of French mercantilism, i.e. the control of the economy and society by a small state elite). His central argument is that France faces a politics of cultural identities, for which these conventional approaches are ill-suited. Resorting to either of them in the face of new social movements (immigrants, homosexuals) exacerbates the feeling of powerlessness of new social actors and reinforces their ideological and confrontational potential rather than the formation of meaningful social agency. France thus faces the problem of reframing politics to incorporate the newly emerging movements that are informed by identity politics and Touraine sketches four exit strategies from the unfavourable ideological juxtapositions of neoliberalism and state management. The fourth strategy which the author presents as a solution remains vague and borders on political decisionism. And it is here that the author’s political leanings for the Jospin/Strauss-Kahn camp show through most clearly. Touraine’s book is insightful, at times polemic, but the core argument fails. His attempt to translate a theoretical analysis of new social movements into a political agenda is a shot too far and lacks argumentative sustenance. The book addresses issues that are of interest to students of French politics, new social movements, and theorists of the ‘Third Way’.
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