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The Ungovernable Society. Grégoire ChamayouЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Ungovernable Society - Grégoire Chamayou


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In short, it was now certain: ‘Capital – and thereby capitalism – has dissolved’.28

      As Daniel Bell concluded, there had once been ‘a society “designed” by John Locke and Adam Smith and it rested on the premises of individualism and market rationality […] We now move to a communal ethic, without that community being, as yet, wholly defined. In a sense, the movement away from governance by political economy to governance by political philosophy – for that is the meaning of the shift – is a return to pre-capitalist modes of social thought’.29

      Here, I would make one remark. This idea of governance, the idea that prevailed before the great neoliberal shift, is what I propose to call, both as an echo of and in contrast with the notion of governmentality, ‘manageriality’. Michel Foucault conceived ‘liberal governmentality’ as an answer to the cardinal problem of the arts of governing: how can the economy be brought within the remit of the state? How is power to be exercised ‘in the form of the economy’?30 As an extension of this project, neoliberalism sought to analyse ‘non-economic behavior’ (etc.) through ‘a grid of economic intelligibility’, leading to ‘the criticism and appraisal of the action of public authorities in market terms’.31 But its predecessor, the managerialism of the 1950s and 1960s, did the complete opposite, in both those aspects (practical and theoretical). Its problem was not that of introducing the economy into the state, but on the contrary of introducing an analogon of political government into the private management of economic affairs. It was not conceived as an art of exercising political power in the form of the economy, but on the contrary as an art of exercising economic power in the form of a certain politics, of a private politics. Manageriality does not have the economy as its ‘major form of knowledge’; rather, its fundamental epistemic predilection gazes beyond ethics into politics and, as we shall soon see, strategy.

      But many, including those who followed the managerialist mindset, were sceptical: ‘how could managers be trusted to advance social welfare when they could not be trusted with their own shareholders?’37

      Rather than relying on the self-proclaimed virtue of the managers, some people proposed regulating the exercise of business power by a kind of internal constitution – a charter stating the rights and duties of management. This meant applying to managerial power ‘the concepts of limited government which are the essence of Western constitutionalism’.38

      In 1962, Richard Sedric Fox Eells, a General Electric executive, noted that wondering whether business possesses a ‘constitutional structure’ is tantamount to asking the ‘question of business governance39 – note that Eells is one of the first to use this term, outmoded at the time, in this new sense. A company is admittedly ‘a producer and a distributor, a supplier and a buyer of economic goods’, but it is also something different, a ‘decision-making centre’, ‘an instrument of power and authority’.40 As such, one can ask it other questions than those raised by economists, questions of governance. ‘Who really controls a company? What power does it exercise? To whom should the power-wielders be accountable, and how? Is the company a “self-perpetuating oligarchy,” as some have charged, or is it a type of republic?’41

      But we need to be careful, warned a 1958 report from the Rockefeller Foundation, for if we accept this, ‘the same sort of question that can be asked of other governments can also be asked of these private governments’, and if ‘the democratic ideals by which the state is properly judged may also be applied to the ways in which the lives of men are governed in the private sector’,43 then we will soon face a major problem: ‘Very simply, the corporation is an authoritarian form of industrial government in a purportedly democratic society’.44 Or, if you apply the standards of political legitimacy to it, there will necessarily be a contradiction ‘between the democratic tradition of government by consent and the inevitably hierarchical and authoritarian procedures of business’.45

      There was even, some thought, a great danger in this. If you shout from the rooftops that ‘management has the worker’s best interests at heart’, warned Peter Drucker in 1950, then ‘management can be legitimate if only it tries’. But how far can it go? It is very unwise to make this kind of promise, as is ‘proven by the one experience that is strictly comparable to modern industrial paternalism: modern colonial paternalism’.46 By mistakenly adopting a rhetoric of ‘government for the people’, the colonialist discourse has placed itself at odds with its ‘obligation to manage the colony in the economic, political or strategic interest of the home country’.47 This kind of language was catastrophic because rather than achieving ‘the one thing that mattered: acceptance by the natives as a legitimate government […] it made the colonial peoples conscious of the split between the ideals of colonial government and its responsibility toward the economic interests of the home country’.48 And this, says Drucker, is a constant in history: ‘All Enlightened Despotisms have ended in revolution’.49 And if people persist, ‘Enlightened Managerial Despotism’ will be no exception to the rule.

      In the name of what, after all, are business leaders appointed by shareholders via the board of directors? There is, he replies, no justification for this state of affairs, except that the former are agents in the service of the latter, and if this postulate falls, everything collapses with it. If you accept that the business leader is a kind of private agent of the public, you will inevitably conclude that ‘it is inadmissible that such public officials […] be named as they are now. If they really serve the public, they must be elected via a political process’.52 By admitting that they exercise governmental functions, managers are unwittingly exposed to criticism, and soon to much worse. For, under the deceptive charms of ethics, Friedman senses the tracks of a Soviet tank: ‘the doctrine of “social responsibility” involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources


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