Michel Maffesoli is considered the founder of "everyday sociology". After graduating in Philosophy, in 1976 he completed his Doctorate in Sociology on social dynamics in Grenoble. After a spell as a researcher and assistant at university, in 1981 Maffesoli became a professor in Human Sciences at the University of Sorbonne.

He is currently director of Sociétés and Cahiers de l'imaginaire, international magazines of human and social science, and of Centre of Present and Everyday Studies (CEAQ). He is also Secretary General of the Research Centre on the Immagination (Centre de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire). Maffesoli has published a number of articles and a lot of books. He is known throughout the world for works such as Le temps de tribus. Le déclin de l'individualisme dans les sociétés de masse (1988), Du nomadisme. Vagabondages initiatiques (1997), La violence totalitaire (1999), Ėloge de la raion sensibile (2000), Notes sur la postmodernité (2003), Le Reenchantement du Monde; une étique pour notre temps (2006).

One of the many dimensions of fear that the WWS invites us to consider, is that of fear as a primitive and uncontrollable emotion. This is a factor that cannot be excluded from the "social tribalism" which Michel Maffesoli defines in his book, The Time of the Tribes (Il tempo delle tribù 1988). In it, he defines post-modern society as a condition where the value models of modernity, i.e. rationality, linearity, order and balance, have ceased to be binding on the actions of individuals. The polytheistic values that post-modern society has imposed do not allow us to identify an alternative, clearly defined model of society. The resulting social dynamics are characterised by a high degree of internal conflict. The situation can be described as an indistinct "mixture" (misculisme) of elements (choices, trends, taste, consumption, etc.), which fall in with a contradictory logic that has no intention of resolving ambiguities and contrasts. On the contrary, it highlights them because of the emotional intensity that they can arouse.

Economic, social and cultural changes which have taken place in recent decades have transformed the world into a tightly knit and complex network. Opportunities to build relationships with others have increased many-fold and the types of relationships and ways of initiating and carrying them on them have changed. "Being together", means socialisation, and it definition includes the forms it takes and the contents of the communication. Today this no longer translates into the model of productivism imposed by modern culture. Rather, it takes the shape of groups which form around strongly shared interests, very much in the present, and with a tendency to disband as soon as the feeling has passed.

This is an excellent example of the post-modern spirit that Maffesoli calls prossemia, or the need to be together in the same environment, whether real or increasingly often, virtual (the internet chat as a "meeting place" that does not require one's physical presence is an example) where one can allow one's self to become emotionally involved, but without lasting involvement. In the affective, empathetic and involving socialization of our times, the need to "be together" is simultaneous with the need for new encounters and new experiences. There is an unstoppable push towards nomadism, a force that pushes us to travel continuously and in a different role every time, through the experiences of others, in other words through participation in various tribes (family, friends, colleagues, occasional meetings, internauts).

As Maffesoli explains in his Ėloge de la raion sensibile (1996), "the individual has a rational function, the person takes on emotional roles". Man's destiny therefore is to transform himself from "an individual, with a specific identity, who can create his own history and contribute to general history along with other individuals into a "person", who can identify himself in multiple roles within a global setting".

This multi faceted definition of the sense and ways of belonging however actually reflects a continuous search for identity. It is here that the discomfort resulting from unceasing and non-linear transition between modernity and post-modernity comes to the fore. Therefore, there is the risk that fear as a positive emotion finds its flip side in fear as paralysing anguish, which can arise when it is difficult to identify secure reference points for essential future existential possibilities. When institutions make tools available (in terms of property, services, opportunities) to humans they limit their vulnerability and this is what pushes humans to trust in them.

Maffesoli tells us in La violence totalitarie (Totalitarian Violence1999), that as long as institutions have a material and economic approach to human "fears", "deferring to a quantitative regime that suppresses every qualitative aspect of social and individual existence", that there is a risk, implied in the title of one of his new books, Le Reenchantement du Monde: une éthique pour nostre temps (The reenchantment of the world: an ethic for our times, 2006). By plunging ourselves into the world of fantasy (which today takes on the trivial forms of videogames, video clips, and all the different cyberspace forms), escaping reality in a final and "natural" way, we do indeed risk "reenchanting our world".