Alain Ehrenberg: Autonomy and empowerment

John Marks

doi:10.1177/09571558211063336

Abstract

This article considers Alain Ehrenberg's extensive analysis of individualism in contemporary France. It shows how he has traced the emergence of autonomy as a key social value, and it goes on to analyse the distinctive features of Ehrenberg's sociological approach. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ehrenberg does not regard the growth of individualism in France as a tragic process of anomie and isolation. In fact, he is critical of what he sees as a pervasive French discourse of ‘declinology’, and he has expressed his growing frustration with this perspective more recently in explicitly political terms. Although he acknowledges that autonomy can be burdensome for individuals, he feels that the state should respond to the sociological fact of autonomy by supporting and empowering citizens as autonomous agents. The article concludes by drawing attention to the limitations of this political position.

Highlights

This article examines Alain Ehrenberg’s highly distinctive analysis of the development of autonomy as a key value and organising social principle in the context of the shift that gathers momentum in the post-war era from a rigidly rule-bound and hierarchical disciplinary regime to more fluid social norms in contemporary French society
It will be shown that, in contrast to French commentators who associate the growth of individualism with a decline of social solidarity and a retreat into the self, Ehrenberg argues that individualism is a form of sociality
The central problem is his suspicion, in psychological, sociological and political terms, of models of conflict. This means that he does not acknowledge sufficiently either the internal psychological conflicts experienced by individuals or the fact that social values are always contested

Summary

Introduction

This article examines Alain Ehrenberg’s highly distinctive analysis of the development of autonomy as a key value and organising social principle in the context of the shift that gathers momentum in the post-war era from a rigidly rule-bound and hierarchical disciplinary regime to more fluid social norms in contemporary French society. In the course of developing this sociological method and perspective Ehrenberg has challenged what he sees as some of the fundamental assumptions of French intellectual life He is highly critical of what he identifies as a distinctively French mode of ‘declinology’: a melancholy French republican nostalgia for the protection and sense of order provided by a ‘real’ society in which there were ‘real’ jobs, families, schools and politics (2010: 15). In contemporary society the individual becomes the privileged source of social meaning and transformation This new focus on the individual radically changes the nature of democratic politics: the ‘Promethean’ search for revolutionary and transformative solutions to conflicts relating to both the self and society has been abandoned in favour of a more individualistic model of human rights and dissidence. He is critical of what he regards as the reductive neoliberal framing of the individual exclusively in terms of narrowly defined rights and economic interests, arguing that it threatens to undermine the fundamental assumptions concerning the connection between citizenship and politics (2016: 330)

Autonomy and malaise

Conclusion