Le phénomène extrême entre résonances cognitives et idéologies conservatrices

Abstract

Extremism, whether political, religious, cultural, ethnic, or racist, poses one of the existential dangers threatening our civilizations and societies. In this article, we propose to examine two categories of extremism: political and religious, highlighting their common processes and ideological structures. Our premise is that extremism, regardless of its nature, could be conceived as the result of a junction between a psychological structure shaped during socialization and subjective experiences, and a corresponding ideology. In other words, there is a resonance between individual psychological structures and conservative ideologies. We believe that this complex phenomenon requires in-depth analysis to identify or reveal this resonance between individual dispositions and extremist offerings. In this sense, our research conducted between 2017-2024 on extremism (political and religious) allows us to grasp similar, if not authentic, mechanisms. We employed several techniques to understand, explain, and describe these phenomena, including questionnaires, biographical interviews, and ethnographic observation. We observed striking similarities between the behaviors, discourses, and social dynamics of these movements, which subsequently allowed us to suggest a common root. Thus, we primarily opted for various perspectives: interactionist, constructivist, and structural-constructivist. These theories helped us highlight the impact of social contexts on the formation of certain individual dispositions. In this article, we propose to explore the connection between psychological structures and ideological offerings by presenting the results of our three investigations on radicalism in France, Salafism in Algeria, and political extremism represented by the Rassemblement National and Reconquête in France