Abstract

Since the end of the 1970s, an incremental erosion of social rights, resulting from successive restructurings of national labour markets that have been encouraged at European Union level, and the consequent emergence of a society of competition, has led to social anomie while at the same time opening the way for a new disciplinary normative order. That new order is shaping or reshaping individual and collective identity by caging people into patterns of relations that promote fear, indifference, intolerance towards others, or feelings of shame and a loss of self esteem. In the most extreme cases, this leads to self-annihilation