Living Right is a beautifully written manuscript that offers a rare combination of rich ethnography and theoretical insights. It has wonderful empirical case evidence that is constantly intertwined and infused with deep theoretical premises and implications. And it is a breath of fresh air methodologically, particularly in the ways the author reflects on the challenges of undertaking ethnographic fieldwork during a postdissertation fieldwork phase of life, especially for women who might want to have children during those years. The interweaving of her pregnancies, breastfeeding, and care responsibilities with the challenges of fieldwork with far-right activists was compelling and moving and will be an inspiration to young scholars wondering about the possibility of combining home and work lives during the years in which one often is launching both career and family. For my generation of women scholars—who were literally advised to “always lie” about a child’s doctor appointment or school play, telling colleagues instead we have a “meeting”—the level of Pasieka’s openness and her integration of these challenges right into the text was remarkable. I applaud it, and as a reader, it made me enjoy the book even more.
The substantive content is just as rewarding. Pasieka’s rich methodological fieldwork over seven years produces deeply compelling empirical and theoretical insights. The concepts of reenchantment and the discussions of resentment and ressentiment are fascinating, as is the discussion of the nation as a moral empire. She offers a rich, substantial, and representative integration and citation of scholarship throughout the book, which, when combined with her original insights from her own data and fieldwork, ensures that this book will make a significant scholarly contribution to the literature on the far right and to the literature on political mobilization and emotional–moral rationales for engaging in politics.
To elaborate on one example: Throughout the book, Pasieka disentangles subtle and insightful threads in how far-right activists conceptualize their sense of purpose and the ways they integrate moral ideals about sacrifice, support for colleagues and friends, community, and a sense of a calling that she argues is not unlike a vocation. What Pasieka refers to as “moral-political subjectivities” are teased out with rich case studies and ethnographic detail. And she offers multiple ways of understanding the purposes of activists’ engagement, showing the layered objectives that are often a part of any given activity. For example, Pasieka helpfully situates far-right activists’ social welfare and food packaging/delivery projects and other community work as serving multiple roles. Such projects help far-right groups appear more sympathetic and benevolent, even situating themselves as undertaking work the state has failed to do for its people. They help reinforce ideas of who is a worthy recipient of support in terms of racial, religious, or national identities). And as Pasieka demonstrates, these activities are also bonding ones for young activists, as they work side by side in volunteer settings and spend time packaging and distributing aid.
Notably, she develops these rich insights while still holding the activists she studies at arm’s length, managing to connect with them on deep and personal levels while still being clear she disagrees with and finds some of their views abhorrent. She is studying people who are hard to study, in the sense that they are unsympathetic, say hateful things, and express views that run counter to inclusive, democratic societies. She acknowledges that while also managing to connect with her participants on areas of shared experience as parents or as members of a similar generation who grew up in post-Communist Poland, to name two examples.
No book is perfect, and there were moments I found myself wanting more from this one. Despite a few mentions of social media and digital ethnography in following activists’ online, Living Right offered surprisingly little engagement with participants’ online worlds. There were times I was reading where it felt this could have just as easily been 1972, or 1982, or 1992 rather than, say, 2022 in the fieldwork descriptions. The relative lack of modern aspects of online radicalization—about memes or online communities (aside from the occasional quote from a Facebook post) was striking.
Perhaps that too is a finding, however. What can we learn from in-person ethnographies that is above and beyond the online data scraping and analysis that is so often the major mode of data collection? Pasieka’s initial acknowledgement of her trepidation of moving into in-person worlds after studying their online worlds could circle back in some way, perhaps, with an acknowledgement of what might be lost by only really understanding how participants engage in their in-person lives. I would have loved to know more about the feedback loop between online and offline worlds as it relates to all of the ethnography analyzed here. Perhaps there is more that did not make it into the book on these issues.
Similarly, I found myself wanting more from Pasieka’s thoughtful analysis of gendered dimensions, wondering in particular whether there were insights that not only reinforced prior findings but also refined or challenged them. Living Right confirms that women are expected to devote themselves to the movement with similar verve as men do, leaning into ideals of sacrifice and devotion alongside a militant struggle. But women are also positioned as subservient to men and their authority. Pasieka helpfully calls for these contradictions to be understood as a kind of multiple femininities, playing off an already well-developed multiple masculinities scholarship. I hope other scholars follow her lead and further develop these ideas both theoretically and with empirical case studies.
Overall, this is a book that should be read not only by scholars of the far right but also by social scientists who study Europe, social movements, and activism, by ethnographic researchers, and by anyone interested in the intersections of politics, morality, emotions, and radicalization and mobilization to extremism.
