Awards

• Winner of 2021 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, Section on Political Sociology, American Sociological Association.

Overview

Many argue that globalization and its discontents explain the strength of populism and nativism in contemporary Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In France, though, an older potential born of imperialism has propelled the far right of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. To explain how the National Front gained a foothold in France, Empire's Legacy connects local politics with historical developments that span nearly two centuries. Its analysis hinges on the idea of political potential: the possibility that a social group will support a movement, pressure group, political party, or other organized option. Starting from the French conquest of Algeria, John W.P Veugelers follows the career of a potential, showing how it erupted into support for the National Front in Toulon, the largest city under the far right of any postwar European democracy.Relying on archival research, electoral surveys, and personal interviews, Veugelers shows that voluntary associations, interest-group politics, and patron-client relations knit together a far-right affinity bequeathed by French imperialism. Veugelers examines the possibilities and limits of far-right power at the local level, moreover, and the barriers that effective, scandal-free government pose to extremist success.Exploring new terrain in the study of contemporary politics, Empire's Legacy makes the case for a subcultural approach that connects social networks to symbolic codes.

Full Product Details

9780190875664

Table of Contents

Reviews

Veugelers brilliantly traces the 'career of a potential'-a disposition formed in specific circumstances, incubating over time, and emerging contingently. His work suggests that it's not enough for political sociologists to focus only on what becomes manifest as political events. We need to also consider what exists in potentia. We need to be on the lookout for 'subterranean currents, countervailing forces, and lost causes.' Otherwise we cultivate blind spots. This is a sociology of possibility but not of the kind sociologists have traditionally looked out for-utopias and the like-but, rather, the negative of this: dark, authoritarian undercurrents. The committee felt that Empire's Legacy pushed the boundary of our subdiscipline forward and expanded the field of political inquiry in ways that felt imperative for our times. * From the 2021 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, Section on Political Sociology *

Author Information

John W.P. Veugelers is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He has written widely on the far right, immigration politics, social movements, and voluntary associations in Canada, France, and Italy. The recipient of awards for outstanding teaching at the University of Toronto, Veugelers has been a visiting professor at universities in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and a visiting fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France.

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