Tribe - From Society to Tribal Communities

The rationalised society is replaced by an empathetic sociality (ambiences, feelings, emotions). Affectual tribes and a new social bond based on emotional pacts replace contractual groups, and we move from an abstractive and rational period to a more empathetic time (where experience is more direct).

Far from the rigidity of traditional communities of class, gender and ethnic belonging, and contradicting those who bemoan the ‘fragmentation of society’, this idea accounts for the ways in which individuals converge to form open and flexible communities of interest, within and between which they interact with the ‘other’.

Michel Maffesoli

Michel Maffesoli, founding member of the FEDE’s Academic Council, a sociologist specialised in the imaginary, a professor emeritus at the Sorbonne, and an internationally recognised author. 30 years after the publication of Maffesoli’s prophetic political work Le temps des tribus [the time of tribes], this new book conceptualises what he calls ‘soft totalitarianism’. In explaining and justifying the meaning of this term, Professor Maffesoli argues that the totalitarianism he is referring to, which is an informed reworking of what common knowledge calls ‘politically correct.

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