Islamophobia in France: Old prejudice in new clothes?

Abstract

There is a long tradition of research on prejudice showing the coherence of attitudes towards others. Sumner (1906) was the first to coin the term ethnocentrism to refer to the tendency to see one's group as the centre of the world and above all others. Adorno and his colleagues linked ethnocentrism to authoritarian attitudes and the rejection of out-groups, seen as subordinate to in-groups (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, and Sanford, 1950, p. 104). To what extent does this pattern still hold true in post-war democracies, where tolerance has become the norm?