Social Change: Radicalism or Reform

Substantial improvements in the lives of ordinary people have undoubtedly been made during the last half-century in France, as elsewhere in the Western world, despite the operation of symbolic power (whereby the dominated, who have internalised the dominant values in society, contribute to their own subjection), on the one hand, and despite the weakness of social movements, considered as the motive force for change, on the other. (Less than 10 per cent of the French workforce are unionised, for example, while the environmentalists and the women’s movement are fragmented.)