He developed a philosophical research around the idea of social contract, postulating that "the constitutive principle of any society is the relation between production and consumption".
But in my opinion, it is this very ambition that makes the book valid (...) It is a true totalization (rather than totality), as it accounts for everything, even the individual (...) Its great merit is to show the best conditions for history to reveal itself concretely for what it is: an ongoing totalization.”[2] This work will give rise to a lifetime of research and writing to develop his work and extend it to the study of French society from 1945 to the present day.
Drawing up the inventory of fixtures of the liberal counter-revolution's consequences, Clouscard produced a philosophical work to think and propose the basis of a new social contract and to enable a progressivist re-foundation.
He relates the permissive evolution of social morality to the needs of a new mercantile order of capitalism – the need to create new markets and to continue the economic oppression of the working class.
Transgressive and libertarian emancipation is not criticized here from the point of view of the individual or civil society as an untouchable monad, but as part of a social body.
In the logic of a political philosophy of the State, the incitement to overthrow the "established order" by culture (Maoism) and the "imagination in power" of May 68, without changing the bases of the society, allowed the creation of new markets.
According to bourgeois ideologists, "free enjoyment" would lead to the individual freedom of workers "playing the game", despite the alienation of the fruits of their labor power (the extortion of surplus value).
The understanding of the codification of the social body according to the being-code relation and through the dialectic of the frivolous and the serious provides the key to freeing the history of France before 1789 from a one-sided celebration of only the progressive aspects of the Enlightenment (struggle for rationalization).
On the contrary, an examination of the Encyclopedists' cautious and measured political conceptions of the Ancien Régime provides an example of their ideological positioning and epistemology, especially anthropological.
Positivist materialism, naturalism is certainly in opposition to the absolutist ideology that is theocracy of divine right, but a figure like Voltaire shows the real horizon of the intellectual elites of the bourgeoisie.
For Clouscard, the Enlightenment elites certainly carry industrialization and rationalization which will be one of the ideological bases of the end of the political hegemony of the nobility and the clergy.
His sociological study leads Clouscard to relativize the ideological enthusiasm of the elites of the new intelligentsia that wants to identify the softening of the moral repression of the models of society and the triumph of the soft revolution of the capitalism, capable of dissolving the blockings and the inhibitions (Freudo-Marxism of Herbert Marcuse).
"[5] In his study of the anthropology of modernity, Capitalism of seduction (Le Capitalisme de la séduction), Clouscard reveals his critique of the ideology of libertarian social democracy.
Written in the wake of the election of François Mitterrand, when Jack Lang was Minister of Culture, this work gives an account of the new permissive education that shapes the existential and conceptual horizon of youth to bring to the workplace not collective claims but individual delusions.
Traditional society assumed participation in laborious tasks and an apprenticeship in work as a principle of reality, but the new civilization abolishes the reference to pain and merit in everyday life.
Moreover, the soft incitement by the presence of the new goods that are the signs of the "look" (the jeans), the relational (the band that completes the "nocturnal" education that the family cannot provide), the mechanical animation of the body (binary rhythms, harmonies of the "psychedelic" impressionism), the emancipating mode of leisure ("cannabis", sexual relations), the regulation of the contradictions and the selection of the most resistant (the enjoyment offers traps that are the addictions, the anomies, etc.)
And for the poorest, the consumption of signs of wealth (sunglasses) but not of their reality (a week in Miami): the imaginary is so pervasive, the system of "cultural" meanings so marked out, that Clouscard summarizes and conceptualizes the operation as the "potlatch of a part of the surplus value" in the direction of the working class: a marginal share of the surplus value extorted from adult workers (especially men) served as seed capital for the creation of new markets in the direction of future exploited workers (youth and women).
"Capitalism swung to the left politico-culturally and swung to the right economically and socially"[7] Michel Clouscard denounced this drift of the market economy at a time when the cycle of alternating recession and recovery introduced unemployment and austerity as a structural horizon for workers, and in particular for the working class, and thus allowed a part of the "over-numbered" and weakened working class to find an outlet in the leisure industry and the "prostitutional economy".
In 1983, Clouscard finished Le Capitalisme de la séduction : "The crisis will reveal the deep nature of this system: austerity (economic repression on the workers, essentially the working class) has as its corollary not only the maintenance, but the expansion of "libertarian" social-democratic consumption.
From Cohn-Bendit (libertarian leftist) to Le Pen (French extreme nationalist), the loop is buckled: here comes the time of frustrated revanchists.”[10]"The State was the superstructural authority of capitalist repression.