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w at all. So we find social democratic rhetoric being deployed to destroy the social democratic policies which grew up in the period after the Second World War.
In France many of those pushing this offensive hail from the 1968 generation. They became radicalised then, but now are incorporated into the system. The failure of the Mitterrand years generated a backlash against the French Socialist Party. Of course, the great revolt of December 1995 ushered in a wave of social movements which brought the Socialists back into power.
But the aim of the government and its technocrats is to curtail and destroy those movements. Ministers and advisers use their prestige and experience from 1968 against the movements.
When students occupied the ole Normale Supieur, the government figure arguing to send the police in firmly and swiftly had himself taken part in the occupations of 1968.
People in Germany and in Britain often tell me that it must be wonderful to live in France with the 35 hour week and other reforms. But those gains are a result of the pressure of the movements. They are not freely given by the government. The left government believes it can be more successful than the right in controlling those movements.
How do your sociological ideas influence your political stance? You developed your ideas when structuralism was the main influence on French intellectuals.

I was not a structuralist. That approach saw the world as composed of structures which strictly determine the way people act. There was no scope for human agency. As the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser said in the 1960s, human beings were merely the 'unconscious bearers of objective structures'. The results of my anthropological work in Algeria in the 1950s did not fit into this structuralist framework.
Of course people are structured by society. They are not, as free market theory holds, isolated individuals each deciding a course of action by making individual economic calculations. I developed the concept of 'habitus' to incorporate the objective structures of society and the subjective role of agents within it.
The habitus is a set of dispositions, reflexes and forms of behaviour people acquire through acting in society. It reflects the different positions people have in society, for example, whether they are brought up in a middle class environment or in a working class suburb.
It is part of how society reproduces itself. But there is also change. Conflict is built into society. People can find that their expectations and ways of living are suddenly out of step with the new social position they find themselves in. This is happening in France today. Then the question of social agency and political intervention becomes very important.
The heart of Marxism is the struggle by the working class for its own emancipation. Where do you place the struggles of the working class within the spectrum of the social movements you are involved in?
Seattle brought together organised labour and various single-issue campaigns. They were often mobilised on different political bases, but they influenced one another. That is new. For the first time we have the possibility of aggregating these kinds of people who were very suspicious of one another.
In France we have this tradition of workerism which is anti-intellectual. The unions are very hostile to intellectuals and the intellectuals are very distant from workers. In 1968 i