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.
In fact, one of the most innovative aspects of the book is, in my view, the way Chamayou delves deeply into the literature emerging in the 1970s on management and managerialism, which in many respects diverges significantly from neoliberal economics. Managers, business leaders and management theorists, rather than thinking only in economic terms, constructed a political project, opposing workplace democracy, for instance, in order to preserve the authority of the ‘private government’ of the firm. Management theorists developed a practical, strategic conception of governance, no longer aimed internally within the individual business but instead oriented outward: an expansive notion of strategic management intended to govern also the social world outside of the firm, ruling over workers, shareholders, consumers and other social forces, as if in concentric waves. These lesser known authors of management theory are in Chamayou’s argument just as important as the well-known neoliberal economists, if not more so, in developing the new paradigm. By highlighting their perspective and their importance, he casts the entire project in a new light.
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.
The question of ungovernability, in fact, can serve as a pivot to look back on Chamayou’s argument from a different perspective. He tells us that his book is a history from above, and, indeed, the dramatis personae who populate centre stage are primarily those on top or, rather, those who serve the interests of the ruling class, preserving the power and wealth of business and élites. It might seem, looking only at this well-lit stage, as if these thinkers, through debates with each other and through the forward march of ideas, were autonomously inventing a new paradigm and driving forward historical development. And yet, incessantly in Chamayou’s book one hears the clamour off stage of social antagonism and contestation, and it is not hard to see that the pressure of those forces is the real motor of the development. He does, in fact, give an excellent account of the rising insubordination of young workers, the threats to corporate profits of consumer movements and environmental movements, and the anti-corporate thrust of the Vietnam War protests. Business and political leaders, economists and theorists were keenly focused on and trembled at the thought of these rising powers. Faced with the rising crisis of governability, they were forced to invent new mechanisms of governance. The development of strategic management and liberal authoritarianism, then, were really a response to the way these forces had made society ungovernable. Chamayou’s history from above, then, has to be read at an angle, because all the drama on stage is really seeking answers to threats of those forces off stage, from below.
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
INTRODUCTION
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.
Before being taken up by critical theory, however, this idea had already been put forward by conservative intellectuals. It was their way of interpreting current events, of problematizing the situation. Democracy, as Samuel Huntington stated in 1975, in a famous Trilateral Commission report to which we will return in detail, was affected by a ‘problem of governability’: a universal surge of popular feeling was undermining authority, overburdening the state with its boundless demands.
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,