Based on the notion of social resilience, a collective work explains how individuals manage to adapt to the changes brought about by the neoliberal era. Far from being a homogeneous program, neoliberalism then appears as a doctrine subject to resistance and reinterpretation.
While in many respects an extension of Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health (2009), this new book coordinated by Peter Hall and Michèle Lamont offers, using the notion of social resilience, an interpretation of the various ways in which actors, individual or collective, have resisted a set of changes which have had place in the world for several decades and which the authors associate with the neoliberal era. A problem that the book studies, through a dozen chapters, in various fields and various countries.
social resilience and neoliberalism
The notion of social resilience is the compass of this collective work. It refers to an experience of individual and societal well-being, to the capacity of actors to lead a “ good life », thanks to the ways in which they manage to cope with the changes brought about by neoliberalism. This capacity depends, as Hall and Lamont explain in the introduction, on a set of institutional and cultural resources allowing individuals to lead a full life, which includes criteria of physical and psychological health, material resources and a sense of dignity. Suffice to say that it is not the personal capacities of individuals to cope with social changes which are the basis of this version of social resilience, but the collective resources which are at their disposal. This is one of the central perspectives of the book: all of the texts brought together rebel against the versions reducing resilience to the sole “ strength » internal of individuals, and proposes to interpret it from a set of social supports and cultural repertoires. This characterization makes it possible to jointly present work articulating micro, macro and meso dimensions. But above all it allows the authors to distance themselves from the idea of a homogeneous imposition of neoliberalism, by highlighting the diversity of responses.
Four main dimensions are addressed, corresponding to the four main parts of the work: the effects of neoliberalism at the level of political regimes (first part) ; the social sources of resilience at the individual (second part) or macro-social level (third part) ; finally, a final and fourth part is devoted to the specific roles of communities and organizations in resilience work.
The first text, co-written by P.B.Evans and WHSewell, Jr., provides the analytical framework of what the work means by neoliberalism, a phenomenon combining an economic theory, a political ideology, a philosophy of public policies, and finally, a social imagination. If the first two points, largely associated with the primacy of the market, are well known, the last two highlight aspects that are sometimes insufficiently emphasized. Indeed, neoliberalism is inseparable from a new paradigm of public policies (in which evaluation systems have a central role) and it has succeeded in imposing an imaginary making the figure of the individual entrepreneur of oneself the basis of a particular vision of freedom. These policies have often led to a concentration of economic power around large corporations, without having the expected consequences in terms of economic growth (and this both in the United States and in Europe, pp.46-47).
In fact, neoliberalism, and this is the whole point of this first framing text, which anticipates others, has experienced very different regional trajectories. In North America, he actively participated in increasing the power of large financial corporations, through tax policies ; in Europe, welfare states have generally been able to resist, and until very recently, while experiencing significant changes following the implementation of new public policy principles at the instigation of theEU ; in Latin America or in East Asia, the results and modalities of neoliberalism are very different, and all the more interesting because if the first zone followed the main precepts of neoliberalism, the second moved significantly away from them, granting a major role to the State in industrial development.
This historical framework and this disparate set of transformations once recalled at the international level, the chapters of the book return to the ways in which the various societies or actors have taken and taken up neoliberal discourses or injunctions, adapting and transforming them depending on the situations. . In many national contexts, the results of neoliberal policies, as mentioned in the text by J. Jenson and R. Levi, have not really led to a contraction in public spending, but rather to new choices for the benefit of new beneficiaries, thus drawing new boundaries between winners And losers ; an aspect also well underlined in the new insecurities generated by neoliberalism, which the text of J.R. Dunn addresses the question of housing (the various measures taken to facilitate access to property have generated both security – residential and ontological – for some and new forms of financial insecurity for many others) .
Likewise, the neoliberal scenario, enthroning the individual, has not only favored the model of the self-entrepreneur actor but has also generated the extension of new uses of Human Rights, and above all allowed the affirmation of multicultural citizenship policies – as W. Kymlicka points out in his text – equidistant from the old concerns of social equality or national identity. It has also, from different cultural repertoires specific to various national societies, produced a wide range of social resilience towards discrimination, as shown in Mr. Lamont’s text, J.S. Welburn and CM Fleming: If the tendency of African Americans to accept individualized explanations of social inequalities increases, their capacity to assert their rights in the name of scripts of competition and self-realization increases at the same time. In other words: neoliberalism, on the one hand, facilitates an individualized internalization of social inequalities as a personal failure, while encouraging a broader sensitivity towards discrimination and equal access to competition. In a similar sense, L.S. Song Hing shows how inter-ethnic and racial prejudices, far from having disappeared under the effect of the values of merit and competition, have been transformed into new modalities that are both implicit and explicit. And moreover, if neoliberalism has favored the expansion of logics of benchmarking (benchmarking of performance) and evaluation at the level of public policies, it also ended up generating growing concerns for social cohesion and new public policies towards children or their initial development (see the text by C.Hertzlab and A .Siddiqi), favoring co-responsibility between the State and families, rather than unilateral accountability of individuals.
By focusing on the effects of neoliberalism on economic opinions and on justice in various developed countries, but also on the differentials in income and well-being between social classes, L. Barnes and P. Hall, underline the permanence of attitudes in favor of social solidarity and towards the responsibility of governments in the well-being of citizens and even in the reduction of inequalities.
A complex approach to neoliberalism
As for the differences in social resilience observable between countries, they are particularly well illustrated through comparisons at the public health level between the United States and Canada (D.Keating, A.Siddiqi, Q.Nguyen). Despite the implementation of a neoliberal program in many respects common to the two countries, Canada – with supporting figures – shows greater resistance to its principles, following a more pragmatic management of reforms, but also because of its political and economic tradition, as G. Bouchard also underlines when he shows what Quebec’s resistance to neoliberalism owes to its ancient national myths and the strength of its imagination of social cohesion. It is also the capacity of societies to mobilize and reinvent old institutions to cope with changes which is at the heart of A. Swidler’s text, and his case study on the uses of chieftaincy in rural Malawi. . Rather than a simple substitution for the benefit of new neoliberal institutions, it notes a reinvention of chiefdom in its capacity to generate collective goods, to be a solution to conflicts and cultural heterogeneity. Finally, Mr. Ancelovici’s latest text shows, based on the French case, the differential in resilience that trade union organizations – the CGT and the CFDT – have been able to have in recent decades, with the help of different political scripts, in the face of the extension of neoliberalism.
In summary, the work defends, with conviction, a thesis: the deployment of neoliberalism over the past 40 years does not take the form of a single and homogeneous program, but, on the contrary, it is declined in a large number of strategies precisely according to differentials in social resilience of actors. This observation, following the book, would be just as true with regard to the transformations that neoliberalism has introduced into the lives of individuals, following policies of individualization of risks and rewards, as at the level of organizations and companies. The conclusion is firm: social resilience appears to be a very general capacity of individuals and societies in the face of change, consequently neoliberalism is no longer to be considered as a dominant ideology globally shaping social relations and minds, but becomes , itself, a doctrine subject to resistance and reinterpretation.
One of the main merits of the work is therefore to propose a complex inventory of neoliberalism. Unlike all those who formulate sweeping condemnations, or on the contrary ideological praise, the book studies, with supporting evidence, the sometimes emancipatory, sometimes much darker character of neoliberalism, in areas as diverse as health, justice, work, recognition of difference, human or social rights.
If we can only follow this major conclusion of the book, on the other hand, the very notion of social resilience, although defined many times throughout the work by the different authors, nevertheless remains vague in its meanings. It sometimes operates as a normative dimension of evaluation and judgment, while at other times it appears to be only a descriptive tool. But above all, and this is the main analytical difficulty, resilience becomes almost a synonym for all the plural capacities that actors – individual and collective – mobilize to face changes. This is why cross-discussions relating to the uses of the notions of “ brackets » or even “ care » (in the aspect given by J.Tronto), even with certain developments of the notion of “ agency » and “ share capital ”, would have been welcome ; they would undoubtedly have allowed the authors to better characterize, by comparison and contrast, the specificities of their definition of social resilience.