Jean-Pierre Worms on the Legitimacy Crisis of the Democratic Regime
* Article: Jean-Pierre Worms: de la légitimité des élites gouvernementales et politiques françaises, et conditions d'une refondation de la république. Revue du MAUSS 2005/2 (no 26), pages 105 à 120. In: Special Issue: Alterdémocratie, alteréconomie. Edited by Alain Caillé and with Immanuel Wallterstein, David Graeber et al . Revue du MAUSS n° 26.
URL = https://www.cairn.info/revue-du-mauss-2005-2-page-105.htm
See: Mauss Review 26 on Alternative Democracy and Alternative Economy
Summary
Reading notes from Michel Bauwens, 2007:
Worms notes a general crisis of trust and participation in political institutions. When the democratic Revolutions chose the People as foundations, it also thought that the real people, an extraordinary diverse mix of local differences, needed an enlightened elite to represent and instruct it. This was justified by the elite’s access to Reason. The people could actively participate through elections only, while being instructed in civic virtues by the educational system. The elite meanwhile was trained in abstraction, and citizens were conceived similarly, bereft of any concrete particularity. In France, this has led to a autonomisation of the political class and its fusion with the State, with the Executive dominating the Deliberative. Elected officials get their power more from their connections than from their voters; and the voters tend to choose them for this very reason. This is how particular interest gets in the way of the general interest. The citizen thus becomes a consuer of politics and the state, with the politicians selling their access so as to provide favourable access to state services.
The system no longer functions with the current speed of change and level of complexity. Reason has broken down in multiple rationalities and the future is no longer deductable from the existing. Furthermore, we now have a much better educated citizenry, capable of autonomous action. It is not civic engagement that is in crisis, but its institutional linkage. There is a refusal to be constrained by institutional logics; a refusal to recognize a monopoly of expertise.
This engagement has a strong expressive content, it is linked to needs for dignity and recognition of concrete specificities.
- “A travers lesquels emane une nouvelle conception de l’interet general … non pas surplombant la societe, MAIS BIEN un processor negocie du bien commun entre les elements differencies du corps social” (p. 114)
It is therefore worng to analyze the current crisis solely in terms of individualism and communautarianism.
- “De plus en plus de politique publique se definissent en politique partenariale.
It is a more pragmatic bottom-up politics we are witnessing, instead of a marketplace of competing ideologies. There are dangers to this dissolution of the political in the social, and of the degeneration of the mechanisms of representation. This danger consists of the loss of time-consuming deliberation, replaced by an event-driven and emotional ‘direct democracy’, of short-term opinion movements.
Participative democracy has other insufficiencies. Associations, as autonomous expressions of civil society, can also become one more arm of the representative institutions, subject to the same processes of technocratisation. To avoid this, citizens today choose temporary engagements in ad hoc associations, but this carries its own pitfalls of fragmentation, but also the danger of cultural inequality, since participation in such specific movements is highly dependent on acquired cultural capital.
As one of the key conclusions, the author warns of attempts to oppose participative and representative models, rather, they must stimulate one another. One represents the bottom-up processes that create new realities; the other the top-down processes of the democratic ‘protocol’ of society, i.e. a set of rights. His final conclusion is that a new Republican integration is needed, not based on abstract unity, but on the recognition of each concrete difference as contributive to the common.