Between a Defence of Society and a Politics of the Subject: The Specificity of Today’s Social Movements

The globalization of exchanges and flux has considerably weakenedthe political arena on the national level in which social movements have previously developed. To a large extent, social movements today try to counteract this tendency by calling upon such frameworks for integration as national populism or diverse forms of communitarianism. As far as the workers’ movement is concerned, the tendency is either for corporatism or for radical opposition to the system. But there exist other cultural rather than social movements which have made peace with the demise of traditional representations of social life and whose main focus is on the experience of individuals. These movements are based on the theme of individual moral autonomy which has been impeded by destructive social changes and by the forms of domination they have produced. Hence, these movements do not so much call for social integration as they do for justice and for a politics of recognition of the individual subject. They seek to avoid both the constraints of free market regulations and the seclusion within collective identities.