The Ungovernable Society. Grégoire Chamayou

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report on ‘the governability of democracies’, mentioned it to illustrate what he preferred to call a ‘crisis of the apparatus of governmentality’:9 not a mere movement of ‘revolts of conduct’,10 but a blockage in the ‘general system of governmentality’.11 There were endogenous reasons for this, irreducible to the economic crises of capitalism, although connected with them. What he thought was starting to seize up was the ‘liberal art of government’.12 We must not anachronistically take this to mean the dominant neoliberalism, but rather what has since been called ‘embedded liberalism’, an unstable compromise between a market economy and Keynesian interventionism. Having studied other similar crises in history, Foucault made the prognosis that, from this blockage, something else was about to emerge, starting with major redevelopments in the arts of governing.

      If society is ungovernable, it is not so in itself, but, in the words of the Saint-Simonian engineer Michel Chevalier, ‘ungovernable in the way that people want to govern it at present’.13 This is a traditional theme in this kind of discourse: ungovernability is never absolute, only relative. And it is in this gap that we find the raison d’être, the real object, and the constitutive challenge of any art of governing.

      In this book, I study this crisis as it was perceived and theorized in the 1970s by those who strove to defend the interests of ‘business’. This is therefore the opposite of a ‘history from below’; instead, it is a history ‘from above’, written from the point of view of the ruling classes, mainly in the United States, at that time the epicentre of a far-reaching intellectual and political movement.

      Karl Polanyi explained that the rise of the ‘free market’, with all its destructive effects, had historically triggered a vast countermovement of self-protection on the part of society – a countermovement which, he warned, ‘was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself’.14 But this was just the kind of conclusion that the organic intellectuals of the business world in the 1970s were coming to: things were going too far and, if current trends continued, they would entail the destruction of the ‘free enterprise system’. What was starting to gather pace in this decade was a third movement, a great reaction from which we have not yet emerged.

      The challenge of the new thinking was not just to produce new discourses of legitimation for a capitalism under scrutiny, but also to formulate programmatic theories and ideas for action aimed at reconfiguring the current order. These new arts of government whose genesis I propose to relate are still active today. If it is important to carry out this investigation, it is because it may help us understand our present.

      This third movement is not reducible to its doctrinaire neoliberal component – far from it. Many procedures and dispositifs that have become central to contemporary governance did not figure in the texts of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, unless they were introduced and defended in complete opposition to their theses. Our era is admittedly neoliberal, but with a bastard neoliberalism, eclectic and in many ways contradictory; its strange syntheses can be explained only by the history of the conflicts that marked its formation.

      This crisis of governability has had as many facets as there are power relationships. They were met, in each field, with specific backlashes. I here focus on the crisis that affected business insofar as it was a form of private government.

      In addition to the issues that are still with us and that will emerge over the course of this book, my choice of topic was motivated by a more specific preoccupation. At the very time when big business is one of the dominant institutions of the contemporary world, philosophy remains under-equipped to understand it. From its traditional corpus, it has mostly inherited theories of state power and sovereignty dating back to the seventeenth century. It has long had its treatises on theologico-political authorities – but nothing of the kind for what we might call ‘corporato-political’ authorities.

      It is now time to develop critical philosophies of business corporations. This book is just a preparatory work in this direction, a historico-philosophical inquiry into some of the central categories of dominant economic and managerial thought – categories that are now prospering, while the conflicts and objectives that led to their development, and continue to guide their meaning, remain forgotten.

      This book is organized along the various axes which, in their interaction, comprised the crisis of governability in business as it was thematized at the time. For the defenders of the business world, each axis corresponded to a new difficulty, a new front on which to mobilize.

      1. A corporation, first and foremost, governs workers. At the beginning of the 1970s, management faced massive indiscipline from the workers. How could it square up to these? How could it restore the former discipline? If the old procedures were obsolete, what form could a new art of governing take? Various strategies were envisaged and debated. (Part I.)

      2. But if we go higher up the vertical axis of subordination, a second crisis appears, this time in the relation between shareholders and managers. Noting that, in companies run by shareholders, managers simply become the managers of other people’s business, and do not have the same interest as the former bosses and proprietors in maximizing profits, some people worried about a possible lack of zeal on the managers’ part, or even worse, a ‘managerial revolution’. How were managers to be disciplined? How could they be brought back into line with the shareholders’ values? (Part II.)

      3. At the same time, on the horizontal axis, in the firm’s social and political environment, unprecedented threats were emerging. Against a growing cultural and political rejection of capitalism, new movements directly attacked the way major business groups were led. How were people to react to what appeared as ‘an attack on the free enterprise system’? They were torn as to the strategy to adopt. (Part III.)

      5. At the behest of the emerging environmental movements in particular, new social and environmental regulations became necessary. As well as the horizontal pressure of social movements there was now, in addition, the vertical expansion of new forms of public intervention. How could these regulatory projects be defeated? How could they be opposed, in theory and in practice? (Part

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