Governability is indeed a compound capacity, one which presupposes, on the side of the object, a disposition to be governed but also, on the other side, on the subject’s side, an aptitude to govern. Mutiny is just one hypothetical instance. A situation of ungovernability can also be the result of a malfunction or failure in the governmental apparatus, even when the governed are perfectly docile. A phenomenon of institutional paralysis, for example, may result from something other than a movement of civil disobedience.
Schematically speaking, a crisis of governability can have two great polarities: at the bottom, among the governed, or at the top, among the governors, and two great modalities, revolt or breakdown: the rebellious governed or the powerless governors (the two aspects can of course be combined). As Lenin theorized, it is only when ‘the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’ that a ‘governmental crisis’ is likely to turn into a revolutionary crisis.8
In the 1970s, conservative theories of the crisis of governability also linked these two aspects. Without imagining they were on the eve of a revolution, these writers were worried about the current political dynamic that seemed to be leading to disaster. The problem was not only that people were growing rebellious, nor just that the apparatuses of government were congested, but that these failures and revolts overdetermined each other, weighing down on the system to the point of bringing it close to collapse.
Foucault, who knew the Trilateral Commission’s 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.
I will here be studying the formation of this countermovement from a philosophical point of view, by tracing the genealogy of the concepts and modes of problematization that underlay it rather than setting out the factual details of its institutional, social, economic or political history. The unity of my object, however, is not the unity of a doctrine (this book is not a new intellectual history of neoliberalism), but the unity of a situation: starting out from identifiable points of tension, from the conflicts which broke out, I shall seek to examine how they were thematized, and what solutions were considered. I will try to examine the ideas that were put to work, their endeavours and the intentions behind them, but also the dissensions, contradictions and aporias they encountered.
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.
When philosophy finally approaches this subject, for example by belatedly incorporating it into its teaching, this often happens in the worst possible way, by regurgitating a naive discourse on business ethics or corporate social responsibility, of the kind produced in business schools. Philosophy these days is no longer the handmaid of theology, but of management.
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