Book. “The words of ‘public’ are back. » Thus begins Audience, the new book by Antoine Vauchez, political scientist, research director at the CNRS and member of the European Center for Sociology and Political Science. After three decades of neoliberal policies that have constantly overwhelmed the deficiencies of public action and affirmed the superiority of market solutions, the words of the public (public services, public decisions, public persons, etc.) are on everyone’s lips, develops the researcher. We need it more than ever.
It must be said that the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, like the climate emergency, forcefully reminds us of the fundamental role of universal public services and the need for massive public investment plans. At the same time, he continues, the private sector falls from its pedestal. Concern is mounting over the risks of an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a small number of “superstar firms” (Gafam and others), which are increasingly influencing our collective destinies.
But we are ill-prepared to respond to this renewed demand for ” audience “. The words themselves have lost their meaning. What can he possibly mean in the age of general deregulation and voracious neoliberalism? It no longer determines “neither a legal regime (status of agents, conditions of access and use), nor a mode of production (non-market), nor a social horizon (equality, universality, etc.), nor even a political circuit (responsibility politics, democratic control, etc.) », regrets the political scientist. For their part, private companies devote a great deal of effort to placing their action under the artificial label of the general interest (the famous “washing” all sorts).
The castle is collapsing
In short, the benchmarks are blurred. And we played the ostrich for a long time. Privatizations, outsourcing of public services, public-private partnerships, state managerial shifts, revolving doors… The list of hitches is long, notes the author. Nevertheless, “the great public mantle with which the State draped itself held firm”hiding the tears.
But today the castle is collapsing: the automatic association between State and public interest is crumbling, and, with it, its legitimacy to exercise exorbitant powers. Citizens are gradually becoming aware, crisis after crisis, of the “deficiencies in government action”now unable to keep the “public” promises of a welfare state.
The public crisis is accompanied by a democratic crisis: the last decades have been those of a growing disjunction between citizens and collective decision-making. All of this is generating a crisis of confidence, all the more deleterious in that it is hitting us at a time when the States and the European Union need it most, to deal with a proliferation of crises (social, economic, health ) and to lead a more than urgent ecological transition.
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