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The Ungovernable Society. Grégoire ChamayouЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Ungovernable Society - Grégoire Chamayou


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– or whatever we are to call the great renewal of reactionary thought that emerged in the 1970s and still dominates our society today. In fact, he contributes to the literature on neoliberalism while simultaneously rejecting that term neoliberalism itself – or, rather, fundamentally reorienting our understanding of it.

      Chamayou accomplishes this reorientation, in part, by giving voice and priority to intellectual and political figures that have largely been left out of the standard accounts. He orchestrates wonderfully the conservative and reactionary chorus in the United States in the battle of ideas that in the 1970s arrived at a new hegemony. He does, of course, engage with and give insightful interpretations of the well-known protagonists of neoliberal economics, such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. But the standard focus on such figures leads too often to a conception of neoliberalism as a single, coherent project. Chamayou demonstrates, instead, that the movement was profoundly heterogeneous.

      A second way that Chamayou reorients our understanding of this movement is by emphasizing its internally varied and political character. This is particularly apparent from the analyses of strategic management. Rather than analysing neoliberalism as a solely or even primarily economic project, we must grasp this heterogeneous project that is political at its core. Many authors have highlighted how neo-liberalism is intimately tied to authoritarian state policies, for instance in the Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher governments. For Chamayou, however, the authoritarian rule that accompanies neoliberalism is not only or even primarily based in the state but instead the power of managers and the firm. Authoritarian liberalism is Chamayou’s preferred term to grasp the range of strategic deployments of power extending from state to business.

      The political nature of the movement is made particularly evident by the repeating lament that Chamayou traces among management theorists: that the firm and society as a whole have become ungovernable. This plaintive cry echoes the evaluations of neoconservatives and neoliberals of the era. The management discourse against workplace democracy, for example, parallels Samuel Huntington’s well-known claim that democracy has gone too far and is no longer sustainable because it has allowed too many ‘minorities’ to make demands on the state and on social resources. It is fascinating (and chilling) to see how in these conservative and reactionary circles in the 1970s, democracy is so willingly sacrificed in the name of governability, which takes the place of supreme value. In fact, the theorists, business leaders and politicians involved in these debates wield the fear of ungovernability as a weapon. Merely the threat of it served to legitimate and make appear inevitable the deployment of new structures of authority at all social levels. But that is not to imply that cynical business leaders and management theorists simply invented the threat to legitimate authority. No, it is important to keep in mind that pressures of social antagonisms, insubordination and indiscipline were very real in the 1970s.

      Although it is firmly rooted in the 1970s and the debates of the era, this book is also profoundly about our present. It demonstrates, in fact, some of the myriad ways in which the structures and strategies of power developed then still rule over us today. And understanding better the birth of these forms of rule will allow us better to contest and eventually overthrow them.

      Michael Hardt

      Governable. Adjective (neologism): that can be governed.

      Example: ‘This people is not governable’.

      Supplement to the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1839)1

      This type of period is familiar. The signs never lie; the same omens had been observed on the eve of the Protestant Reformation or the Russian Revolution. So says the Californian engineer and ‘futurologist’ Willis W. Harman, for whom all the indicators of a major earthquake are now flashing red. They include: ‘Increased rate of mental disorders. Increased rate of violent crime, social disruptions, use of police to control behavior. Increased public acceptance of hedonistic behavior (particularly sexual). […] Signs of anxiety about the future […], decreased trust in institutions of business and government. Growing sense that old answers no longer work.’2 In short, it is ‘the legitimacy of the present social system of the industrialized world’ that is crumbling, as he warned us in 1975.

      And indeed, widespread rebelliousness was in the air. No relationship of domination was left untouched: insubordination in the hierarchy between sexes and genders, in the colonial and racial orders, in the hierarchies of class and labour, in families, on campuses, in the armed forces, on the shop floor, in offices and on the street. According to Michel Foucault, we were witnessing ‘the birth of a crisis in government’ in the sense that ‘all the processes by which men govern each other were being challenged’.3 What happened at the beginning of the 1970s, as people have since remarked, was a ‘crisis of governability that preceded the economic crisis’,4 a ‘crisis of governability’ at the levels of society and business,5 a crisis of ‘disciplinary governability’6 that foreshadowed major changes in the technologies of power.

      The word ‘governability’ was not a recent invention. In French, gouverner can mean both ‘to govern’ and ‘to steer’; gouvernabilité had already been used in the nineteenth century to refer, for example,


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