Abstract
For decades, research on the radical right has stressed the importance of two factors: supply and demand. Where the latter points at political and institutional aspects that create niches for the far right, the former refers to conditions that lead to the formation of a reservoir of voters that such far-right parties can exploit. Goodliffe’s book is part of a vastly expanding body of work that tries to move beyond this dichotomy by paying close attention to the role of large-scale historical and cultural processes (e.g., Berezin, 2009). This new branch of work tries to combine supply and demand factors and situate them within changing cultural contexts to solve empirical puzzles that previous approaches alone could not.
Goodliffe’s puzzle is the periodical recurrence of radical right parties in France. Ever since becoming a democracy in the late nineteenth century, France has experienced three waves of right-wing mobilization: (a) the Boulanger movement and anti-Semitic leagues in the 1890s, (b) the proto-fascist and nationalist movements of the mid-twentieth century, and (c) the rise of the Front National in the 1980s.
On the demand side, scholars have identified radical right heritage in France culture. This line of work, however, is not able to explain the periodical attraction to this tradition. Scholars working on the supply side, on the other hand, have ignored the radical traditions altogether and consider only strategic reactions to contemporary socioeconomic shocks. Therefore, the author tries to combine the best of both worlds by analyzing how radical right ideologies and electoral demand of specific groups converge in times of socioeconomic hardship.
To do so, he shifts the analytical focus from a homogenous universe filled with strategic individuals to a world constituted of different social classes that observe the political environment through different class-cultural lenses, or cultural systems as Goodliffe dubs them. These cultural dispositions, feelings, values, and norms that inform perceptions of social conditions are in themselves shaped by long-term processes, such as democratization and industrialization.
Opposing the viewpoint that the role of class has diminished, sociological studies demonstrate that in times of social crisis the les petit indépendants (PI), a class of small producers, traders, craftsmen, and artisans, form the strongest support base of the radical right. With the rise of the FN in the 1980s, industrial laborers joined PI in their support. Goodliffe’s main research strategy therefore is to trace the cultural systems of PI and industrial laborers over time and, based on secondary literature, deduce how they evolved under influence of democratization and industrialization.
The author argues that although the PI have throughout time always seen themselves as superior defenders of preindustrial smallness, order, family, and nonstate interference, their disposition toward democracy has fluctuated with their access to mainstream politics. Compared to factions in other industrializing countries in the West, the PI in France have been able to maintain a powerful political position for a long time. The weak financial system, late transport integration, market segmentation, and artisanal character of the labor force have enabled the PI in France to form “a non-capitalist world on the fringes of capitalism” (Jaeger in Goodliffe, p. 69). This powerful position, in combination with France’s early democratization, enabled the PI to gain political influence. In exchange for electoral support for other bourgeois groups, the PI obtained trade protection and tax and social welfare exemptions. This further deterred economic modernization in general and concentration in particular. The union between PI and le grande bourgeois also established a rather schizophrenic mind-set of indépendance that combined PIs preindustrial social values with respect for parliamentary democracy.
According to Goodliffe, this coalition and accompanying mind-set could not endure. The need for economic modernization in the 1890s and industrial consolidation after World War I forced political elites from the left and right to stimulate economic concentration at the expense of PI’s position and expand state intervention. The PI, who also suffered from dwindling numbers, were pushed out of the mainstream politics, and as a result, large portions of the PI became active in extraparliamentary groups and were socialized into antiestablishment dispositions. When the depressions that followed these waves of rapid economic transformation hit PI disproportionally, the combination of preindustrial values and political alienation made this class particularly susceptible to radical right ideology, with its disdain toward modernization and democracy and its desire to return to premodern family values and leadership.
Goodliffe suggests that a related pattern can be discerned when looking at the workers’ support for the FN in 1980s. With the introduction of automation and flexible employment and the rise of deindustrialization in the 1970s, the long-term ability of workers’ movements to reconcile workers with French capitalism corroded and working-class pride vanished. Looking for new purpose and disappointed with the political process, many workers therefore latched onto the Front National.
Goodliffe’s emphasis on large-scale processes and class-cultural systems refines the culturalist study of far-right success in at least three ways. First, he demonstrates that social-cultural transformations and cultural traditions do not affect all citizens in the same way. He teaches us that we should not conceptualize cultural contexts and their effects on far-right voting as negotiations between political elites and a homogenous group of citizens (Berezin, 2009), but take into consideration how far-right voting interacts with the cultural systems and electoral strength of different social classes. This will enable us to shed light on why some groups support the far right but not others and why some socioeconomic developments lead to the rise of the far right in some countries but not in others.
Second, the book convincingly drives home the point that national cultures and mentalities of groups are not static but evolve over time under influence of socioeconomic developments. Instead of coming up with static and national models of cultural discourse (Koopmans, Statham, Guigni, & Passy, 2006), Goodliffe demonstrates how an analysis of cultural and socioeconomic dynamics helps us understand the evolution of the far right. This approach can be extended to countries other than France. In a loose fashion, Goodliffe shows how this can be done in chapter 9, where he analyzes how the sequencing of democratization and industrialization made small independents culturally more susceptible to far-right voting in some countries (Italy and Germany) than in others (Great Britain). The combination of fast industrialization without representation in Italy and Germany created a mentality of “cultural despair” among the lower bourgeois, which could be exploited by fascist movements. Britain’s gradual democratization and industrialization on the other hand limited alienation among small independents while luring them into the liberal political system, creating a proliberal mentality.
Third, culturalists sometimes have the tendency to dig themselves in and lose sight of broader socioeconomic processes. Goodliffe’s methodology, however, takes socioeconomic and political developments as a starting point. This enables him to reveal how structure trickles down into the cultural systems of the petit bourgeois and forges linkages among cultural, political, and economic processes. It is the interaction among the three that explains the resurgence of the right.
In the future, Goodliffe’s research agenda could also profit from a closer conversation with the culturalist literature on electoral mobilization in general and the far right in particular. We have, for instance, seen considerable growth in qualitative studies that analyze how (potential) supporters of the extreme right experience and perceive the political realm (e.g., Klandermans & Mayer, 2006). Although Goodliffe’s fascinating narrative details how socioeconomic and political developments deteriorated the actual socioeconomic position of the petit bourgeois, it would be instructive to have some indication of how the petit bourgeois perceived these changes and how these subjective experiences changed over time in light of the cumulative memories that the author describes. Instead of simply deducing their cultural values from structure, this would make it easier for the reader to assess how and when economic and political alienation translated into support for the far right. Of course, conducting such a line of inquiry for a long time span is complicated enormously by data limitations.
Second, although the author makes the highly plausible argument that in times of crisis far-right ideology appealed to a class with traditional values that opposed economic centralization and became more and more excluded from the political process, it also would be interesting to learn more about the processes through which radical right parties were able to mobilize the cultural system of the petit bourgeois at specific points in time and not at others. Here a link could have been forged with work on collective framing in social movement studies, a field that took a cultural turn more than two decades ago to try to shed light on how cultural systems of social groups and political ideologies of movements align (Snow, Burke Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986).
All in all, embedding Goodliffe’s thoughtful analysis into a broader culturalist research agenda could result in a nuanced framework of study that focuses on how the success of the radical right emerges out of large-scale socioeconomic processes in interaction with dynamic national cultures and cultural systems of different social groups.