Neoliberal Republic

Antoine Vauchez, Pierre France, Meg Morley

Description

The Neoliberal Republic traces the corrosive effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Casting a piercing light on this circulation of influence among corporate lawyers and others in the French power elite, Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France analyze how this dynamic, a feature of all Western democracies, has developed in concert with the rise of neoliberalism over the past three decades. Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a unique biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, The Neoliberal Republic explores how the always-blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare. The cumulative effect of these developments, the authors reveal, undermines democratic citizenship and the capacity to imagine the public good.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• Legal history
• Ideology
• History of Europe
• France

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501752575
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE NEOLIBERAL REPUBLIC

Series editor: Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell University

CORPUS JURIS: THE HUMANITIES IN POLITICS AND LAW PUBLISHES BOOKS AT THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN LAW, POLITICS, AND THE HUMANITIES—INCLUDING HIS- TORY, LITERARY CRITICISM, ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGIOUS STUDIES, AND

POLITICAL THEORY. BOOKS IN THIS SERIES TACKLE NEW OR UNDERANALYZED ISSUES

IN POLITICS AND LAW AND DEVELOP INNOVATIVE METHODS TO UNDERTAKE THOSE

INQUIRIES. THE GOAL OF THE SERIES IS TO MULTIPLY THE INTERDISCIPLINARY JUNC-

TURES AND CONVERSATIONS THAT SHAPE THE STUDY OF LAW.

THE NEOLIBERAL REPUBLIC Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France

Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France translated by Meg Morley foreword by Samuel Moyn

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University

Originally published as:Sphère publique, intérêts privés:Enquête sur un grand brouillage© 2017 Presses de Sciences Po. English language translation, © 2020 Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: France, Pierre, 1987– author. | Vauchez, Antoine, author. Title: The neoliberal republic : corporate lawyers, statecraft, and the making of publicprivate France / Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France ; translated by Meg Morley ; foreword by Samuel Moyn. Other titles: Sphère publique, intérêts privés. English Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2020. | Series: Corpus juris : the humanities in politics and law | Translation of: Sphère publique, intérêts privés : enquête sur un grand brouillage, published by Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026688 (print) | LCCN 2020026689 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501752544 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501752551 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501752568 (epub) | ISBN 9781501752575 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Political corruption—France. | Conflict of interests—Political aspects—France. | Politicians—France— Attitudes. | Public administration—Moral and ethical aspects—France. | Political ethics—France. | Law—Political aspects—France. | Public interest—France. | Corporate lawyers—Malpractice—France. | France—Politics and government—Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: LCC JN2738.C6 F7313 2020 (print) | LCC JN2738.C6 (ebook) | DDC 364.1/3230944—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026688 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026689

Cover image: Nicolas Milhé,Respublica, 2009. Photo by Pierre Antoine. Used by permission.

CONTENTS

Forewordby Samuel Moyn Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE Inbetween the Public and the Private: The New Lawyering Business

TWO The PublicPrivate Foundations of the Neoliberal State

THREE The Hollowing Out of the Public Interest

FOUR A Black Hole in Democracy?

Conclusion: On the “Publicness” of the State

Afterword: Macron, theNouveau Monde, and the Crowning of the PublicPrivate Elite

Appendix 1: Methodology Appendix 2: Glossary General Bibliography Index

vii xi

1

15

55

91

117

151

155

163 167 173 185

v

FOREWORD

This book adds to the emerging story of the rise of neoliberalism around the world, showing how corporate lawyers in France ushered in rapid privatization after the end of the Cold War and transformed the famously strong state in that country. The process that Pierre France and Antoine Vauchez reveal is not sim ply that of the state becoming less and less of a counterweight to markets (and, instead, more geared toward their establishment and protection) nor of its assets and activities being transferred to private actors. That happened elsewhere. Rather, they detail how, in France, the regulatory task of the state was itself priva tized, and that corporate lawyers were the pivotal actors in this astonishing devel opment, inventing an unprecedented “publicprivate state.” The authors deserve immense credit for so successfully blending novel and startling facts, especially with regard to the revolving door between public and private service, with an astute sense of the overall trajectory of neoliberalism in one country—while at the same time incorporating a broader analysis of that phenomenon and offering insights into how its opponents can still resist it. The literacy with the theory of the modern state in various locales on display in these pages makes this book far more than a case study of one place or even one time. After their eyeopening account of the rise of the corporate lawyer from the grave of the publicminded advocate in the country’s republican tradition, France and Vauchez compellingly demonstrate that lawyers representing “pri vate” interests were able to bring their expertise to bear in substituting for the state’s former regulatory power a new governmental form that blurred the divide between public and private. In this argument, the authors hew to an emerging orthodoxy that whatever neoliberalism is, it is not “market fundamentalism,” defined as a rollback of the state; rather, it is a transformation of the state in the image of business interests and as their tool. “Lobbying is an extension of legal counsel,” one source reports. Experts move back and forth between the offices of state and the corporate bar, the authors show in their bravura survey of officials. Amazingly, onetime bureaucratic hubs have been displaced by breakaway new outposts of public authority where business interests are regulated in a mode that comes close to selfregulation in the guise of state oversight. In the place of

vii

viii FOREWORD

the state once epitomized by Talleyrand, a corporate lawyer sits—literally in the same room where Talleyrand died, as France and Vauchez saw firsthand. Ultimately, this book hints at a new kind of reality in the history of the state form—and not merely one in which the corporate lawyers abet its transfor mations. No longer can Alexis de Tocqueville’s mythology of the constant ten dency toward administrative centralization from the Old Regime to the French Revolution to post–World War II dirigisme prevail. But the potential reality elsewhere—ofthedisplacementofthestate—alsofailstomatchthenewfactsof France’s regulatory scheme. Rather, as the authors helpfully suggest, the neolib eral state in France is not primarily defined by privatization of enterprise, though it has certainly occurred there and accelerated since the millennium. Instead, a “publicprivate state” has begun to crystallize. Part of the transformation concerns career paths. Where once the “state nobility” as a destination of personal achievement might have appealed to the best and the brightest, now it is plausible to assert (as an informant does here) that one is “defending the public interest in the private sector.” Such beliefs tran scend individual or even collective rationalizations to be part of a credible and widely shared common sense. One of the richest sections in the book illustrates the dense new sociability that sustains what is, in the end, a delusional mistake that no one within its boundaries can recognize as such. This error persists in spite of prior national assumptions that would have regarded such activities as sacrificing the general interest and will to particular agendas and concerns. Beyond personal trajectories, the scope of this change is reflected in the vocation of institutions. As France and Vauchez detail, theConseil d’État—the country’s supreme administrative court since the days of Napoleon—has maintained its traditional charge of ensuring national legal unity, while redefining the terms of its mandate to reflect the new porosity between the public and private realms. The work that theConseil d’Étatand other legal institutions of the state are con ducting, supposedly for the benefit of the French people, is not only reconstruct ing the public economic interest as market promotion but doing so through a constellation of nominally public authorities. This is not a tale of a restricted or underfunded state but one empowered to rule by personnel moving so regularly between public and private capacities as to blur the line between them. After reviewing the abstention of other authorities that could deter these results, France and Vauchez conclude by appealing to American political theo rist Michael Walzer’s notion of “the art of separation.” Walzer’s insight is that much of the endurance and legitimacy of political institutions concern not what rules they are following but whether they are able to maintain their own spheres of authority without molestation from outsiders. This book shows that just the

FOREWORD /Ix

reverse is occurring in France, in a kind of unholy deconstruction of the public/ private distinction for which feminist theorists have called in a very different context. Where the erosion of that separation, feminists insisted, allowed for collective approaches to forms of domination hitherto viewed as “private” and therefore unassailable, this book highlights that the authority of the public needs tobepublic in the first place in order to have authority over other actors. No doubt, much of the account in this book is exceptional—perhaps not least, the publicmindedness of a neoliberalism that rules unashamedly else where through private empowerment. Even as a case study, this book offers an astonishing scenario of the revolt of the elites—lawyers in particular—in our time. But there are general themes that resonate in these pages, too. The book dramatizes one more episode in the loss and perversion of the public good. No one seriously interested in the history of neoliberalism and the role of the legal profession in its entrenchment can afford to miss France and Vauchez’s mea sured but hardhitting investigation. Among the many pressing questions this indispensable book raises are how broadly applicable its conclusions are and whether its authors’ recommendations for changing the trajectory of this less than salutary story can play out in France—and everywhere neoliberalism is cre ating destructive new state forms. Samuel Moyn