The Building of Social Representations of Right-Wing Extremism

Generally, most disciplines in the social sciences, including social psychology, refer today to social representations. They often take this theory as a basis for their analysis of social phenomena. Going briefly back to the origins of social representations, this chapter shows first how deeply rooted they are in social knowledge and why they can be taken as an efficient theoretical tool to grasp the specificity of the contemporary extreme right. It will then analyse how extreme-right membership proceeds, taking examples in four countries (France, Italy, Hungary and Romania). ¹ It is also worth mentioning that I had already set up (see Orfali 1990a) the premise of so-called internalist perspective (Goodwin 2006), which was then to be emphasized in Klandermans and Mayer’s (2005) well-known analysis of European extreme-right activists.