No philosophy, please, we are managers

Claude Rochet is Full Professor, Institut de la Gestion Publique et du Développement Economique, Paris and Institut de Management Public et de Gouvernance Territoriale, Aix-en-Provence.

© The authors, 2010. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Vol 76(2):279–312 [DOI:10.1177/0020852310375539]

InternationalReview ofAdministrativeSciences

‘No philosophy, please, we are managers’ Public Management and the common good: Euro-Atlantic convergences

Claude Rochet

AbstractPublic management, as an academic discipline, has been, up to now, inspired by a managerialist approach, axiologically neutral, which cast aside the great questions regarding the ends of public life, those of the common good and of the ‘good life’ that were at the very basis of classical political philosophy. Governing has been reduced to ‘governancing’, relying on the presupposition that good means automatically leading to good ends. Based on critiques of this drift, we witness on both sides of the Atlantic the renewal of the old republicanism that makes the common good the aim of public administration. This debate has been at the very foundation of the modern democracies since the 17th century in England, to the foundation of the United States and the republican tradition stemming from the French Revolution. This article envisages how public management could reju-venate itself to mend the broken link between the managerial and the political, putting emphasis on what would be the consequences on the training of public managers.

Points for practitionersPractitioners are often stuck in a false alternative: either a state bureaucracy or the adoption of a neoliberal solution represented by the bundle of the new public management tools based on the search for efficiency. This article goes back to the roots of the debate on the role of the state in economic growth since the Renaissance and shows that the issue is not one of chosing between state or no state but to articulate appropriately the political role of the state as an institution maker and end the initiatives of the market. By drawing a comparison between

280 International Review of Administrative Sciences 76(2)

the first financial crisis (the 1720 South Sea crisis) and the current crisis, it points out the central role of polity against the current predominance of economics in the mainstream ideology, and rehabilitates the role of civic virtues in ruling public affairs. A comparison is made between classical Europe and the history of the US that shows this debate has been constant in nation-building and the the present period of turbulence calls for a renewal of the role of the politics, far from the NPM hype that dominated the field of public administration for the past twenty years.

Key words: Political philosophy, research programmes, public management, common good, history of England, History of the United States, financial crisis

‘Management is not a neutral technique but an activity inexorably linked to politics, public poliicies, the law and the stakes of civil society. It is always present in values and /or ideologies

Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert Public Management Reform: a Comparative Analysis, 2004

It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work, and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak, and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised, to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.

A. de Tocqueville. De la Démocratie en Amérique.

Public management has been dominated by the idea that the notions of the state and government can be reduced to ‘good governance’: efficiency and transparency of public action, clarification of the decision-making and responsibility circuits, etc. Should we, from now on, cease to govern and replace it with ‘to governance’, that is reducing politics to management? Opposed to these ideas from neo-classical economics, which emphasized the importance of organizational performance, are ideas from institutional economics and the evolutionary school, which insist on the role of institutions in both the developing countries and in the evolution of developed counties and have been able to identify the comparative institutional advantages in the explanation of differences in growth between nations.

Good management does not necessarily mean good government. Managing well does not mean governing well: our accounts may be accurate but our political choices can be unjust or mistaken. The ‘indicators of good governance’ promoted by the OECD and the World Bank, aim to define the ultimate criteria for compari-son between nations using the practice of benchmarking. These techniques, which originated in the private sector, are diverted from their original use, which was as a self-evaluation tool in the context of quality procedures, and can only be applied to recurring processes in a stable, comparable environment, such as the QCD (quality, cost, deadline) of civil servants’ pay or the time taken to access an emergency ser-vice. Turning them into an ultimate classification of what constitutes a ‘good govern-ment’ by compiling heterogeneous data out of context makes little sense and could

Rochet Public Management and the common good 281

simply be, as Pollitt (2010) notes, a vague desire on the part of the World Bank to get its hands back on the promotion of a single model after the abandonment of the Washington consensus and the rediscovery of the role of the public sector.

Matt Andrews (2008), in a comparison between the level of development over twenty years and classification according to the World Bank indicator, shows first, that the sole criteria of good governance are inconsistent; second, that there is no correla-tion between performance development and the observation of these criteria, and, above all, third, that it is not appropriate for developing countries to try to use these criteria. Formal indicators, without a solid theoretical base about long-term develop-ment, about the role of the state in development and which would permit an under-standing of how development strategy is determined in each country, are necessary in order to define what an effective and efficient state would really be.

This work began to be undertaken by heterodox economists (Reinert, 2007, Chang 2003, Sapir 2007, Rodrik 2008 — amongst others) in an effort to link institutional and developmental economics by emphasising the political characteristic of such criteria. The aim of this article is to contribute to this thought-process and to move away from the strictly managerial approach to public decision-making, by showing that advances in institutional economics are forcing us to re-emphasize the classical criteria of politi-cal philosophy — that of the common good — at the centre of public decision-making and to see their effect on pubic sector administrators.

This article is composed of five parts:

1 The first part will look at the limitations of purely managerial approaches arising from the New Public Management (NPM) and will integrate the most recent knowledge from evolutionary theories in order to escape the false alternative posed by current thought: either a bureaucratic state, or no state at all, in the name of faith in the auto-regulating capacity of the market.

2 It is now possible to reconsider the role of the polity in this dynamic by underlining the fact that the role of the state lies in the evolution of the system of beliefs — particularly in periods of technological change and transitional crisis — which implies a return to considering the fundamental questions of political philosophy: those of the common good and the role of civic virtue.

3 The third part looks at the fortunes and misfortunes of civic virtue in the building of modern nations, comparing, the evolution of the debate, since the 17th century, in England, France and in the making of the United States.

4 The fourth part concerns the Euro-Atlantic debate centred on the role of republicanism which updates the role of the common good as the basis of the evolutionist institutional dynamic and consequently of public organizations.

5 In the conclusion, the implications for the education and the training of the elite public administrators will be considered from the perspective of updating Weber’s model, in both its fundamental and practical aspects, as regards skills development.


The limitations of a purely managerial approach

The New Public Management vogue (hereafter referred to as NPM) developed theories concerning the difference between management and politics through the canonical principle ‘let managers manage’ on the ground that administrative com-plexities had become much too big for the powers-that-be to deal with without being overloaded by minor technical questions at the expense of the essentials.

NPM, in its first wave of reforms in New Zealand, based its theories on the neo-liberal corpus: agency theory, the theory of public choice and transaction costs (Gregory, 2006). The state becomes primarily a provider of services, its intervention in the economy and its regulatory function being limited to market failures, which are by definition less frequent and less serious than state failures. NPM’s approach was to separate the domain of ‘doing things righ’ — management — from that of ‘doing the right thing’ — politics. NPM’s plan was to build low but solid, adopting an institutional configuration whereby civic values are ruled out and are replaced by the simple efficiency of management (Laegreid and Christensen, 2002: 119). In the academic literature the term ‘new paradigm’ is used to describe the revolution sup-posedly incarnated by NPM.

It would be unfair, simplistic and harmful, following our demonstration, to wish to compare NPM to ‘Anglo-Saxon liberalism’. The country that was the best disciple in Europe of a model free from the ideological gangrene of Thatcherism was German-speaking Switzerland. NPM represents a culmination of the logical positivism in the social sciences that originated in France with Descartes and his concept of man enthroned; ‘masters and possessors of nature’, was then seen in the political econom-ics of Jean-Baptiste Say and the positivism of Auguste Comte, and flourished with the mathematical economics promoted by Cournot, Dupuit and the group of engineers from the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées who invented marginalist economics in 1838, well before Léon Walras in 1870–1874.

On the Anglo-Saxon side, right from the start, there was criticism, admittedly from a minority, of the lyricism of NPM and the ‘reinvention of government’. As early as 1990, Pollitt criticized the abandonment of thought about values at the expense of ‘managerialism’ alone, supposedly an activity in itself incorporating politics, technol-ogy and social needs to ensure material progress. The United States, for its part, stuck to its traditional pragmatism, restricting itself to advocating for others that which it undertook cautiously through experiments, especially in the cities, but immediately adapting practices as soon as the ideology showed its limits (Rochet, 2007).

There is no denying that NPM, through its promotion of management techniques that it in no way invented, has made important contributions to the management field — mainly in terms of the development of management control and accrual account-ing — and public management research can today assess more than two decades of reform (Kettl, 2005, Bartoli, 2004, Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000, 2004). Today the star has faded and has given way to pragmatism which can handle several types of strat-egy and tactics that vary according to the context (Schick, 1999, Pollitt, 2003).

Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004) show that, in empirical practice, it is a neo-weberian two-dimensional state which is emerging:


1 The state remains the main piloting and regulatory force in the evolution of society, ‘the objective is not the minimal state advocated by certain Anglo-American politicians. The state is not considered principally as a burden on the economy and society, nor as a necessary evil. It acts more as the guarantor and partner of both a strong economy and the cohesion of a civilised society’ (Pollitt, 2008). Of course this role changes according to the different strategies that need to be considered in the new socio-economic paradigm (Innovation, a State Affair, Rochet, 2007).

2 The state machine is becoming modernised using new technologies and management methods, which have enabled it to be more efficient. ‘But there is no assumption that aping the private sector — or actually using the private sector — is the only way to achieve efficiency and professionalism’ (Pollitt, 2008).

Christopher Pollitt insists on the fact that the Neo-Weberian State (NWS) con-cept never claimed to be a new paradigm, in spite of the labels attributed to it by many researchers.1 The attitude whereby the slightest model becomes a ‘paradigm’ unfortunately is generally found in the social sciences, resulting in the notion losing its meaning. I adhere to the definition given by Thomas Kuhn, that is ‘particular and coherent traditions in scientific research’, a set of ‘primary principles’ which permit the development of new analyses and new concepts which represent the principal activity of ‘normal science’. ‘The work is done once and for all (. . .) and is destined to be adjusted and specified in new or more limited condition’ (Kuhn, 1983).

The stake is not simply academic: it is political. If public management can claim to be a paradigm in itself, a scientific revolution that annuls all previous concepts, it permits a tabula rasa of the past and a rupture of links with politics and changes in the socio-economic paradigm, thus becoming an auto-referential concept. Laurence Lynn (2001) shows that if there ever was a public management paradigm, it amounts to traditional principles of the separation of power and citizen control over admin-istrative power, and that wanting to replace the Weberian ‘bureaucratic paradigm’ with the supposedly ‘new paradigm’ of NPM turns out to be a far greater threat to democracy by separating administration from politics.

Leaving aside the false alternatives

If in the Anglo-Saxon world we are witnessing a rebirth of the importance of public service ethos, of the political state and its role, the mainstream views remain coined with beliefs founded under the influence of NPM: ‘the private sector manages better than the public sector’, ‘the size of the state must be reduced’, ‘good management gives good results’.

The French concept of ‘state reform’ is emblematic in this matter: it is in fact only a question of public management and not of the state as an institution. The confu-sion is accentuated in the translation from English to French — notably in OECD work — whereby ‘government’ is translated by ‘Etat’ whereas it is really the administration that is being referred to (OCDE, 2005). France has long had a ‘Minister of State for Reform’ who was in fact only a minister for administrative modernization.2 The last act of this confusion was achieved in the transfer, in 2006, of the services of the Ministry of State for Reform to the Ministry of Finance as part of the management of the


state modernization to be controlled by Bercy. In the process of a ‘general revision of public policies’ (RGPP) the ‘State missions’ are only considered from an efficiency per-spective: a managerial, financial and accountancy approach has replaced the political dimension of the state.

In this way, the reform debate tends to centre on a false alternative: either we accept reform and its underlying neo-liberalism, or it is refused on the grounds of defending the state’s role and the status quo must be accepted.

The debate concerning the role of the state can be organized according to a demar-cation line which broadly separates the neo-classics on one side, the Keynesians on the other; according to Joseph Stiglitz’s formula, between those who are convinced, on the one hand, that ‘the State generally does not work’ and that ‘market forces work’, and vice-versa for the other side. Either we support state intervention and we must accept the cost and the inconvenience of such actions — bureaucracy and its costs — or the latter must be counteracted using performance logic which forcibly leads to the disintegration of the state as an institution.

If this alternative is adopted it can only lead to a process of bureaucratic euthanasia of the state: the incapacity to solve the bureaucratic problem at the public organization level has become a pretext for suppressing the public sector, even to questioning the principle of the state itself as an institution.

This type of reasoning cannot claim to find its source in liberal humanist thinking which, from Smith to Hayek, has never denied either the role and the necessity of having a strong state, or that of its intervention in social and economic life. For classi-cal liberal thinkers, the issue was liberating the state from its sinecures and associated costs in order to guarantee its liberty of action in accordance with a law sheltered from contingencies, and not to remove economics from the domain of the moral sci-ences to make it into a science in itself, as the political economists of the 19th century will claim (Polanyi 1944, Alvey 2000).

It is therefore a question of intellectual method. Through critical analysis of the weaknesses of current research programmes, the objective must be to reconcile questions of ‘how’ and ‘what’; the dynamic of institutions and organizations.

The theory of knowledge as a demarcation line

Friedrich Von Hayek founded his research on the theory of the state and its action on a theory of knowledge, by rejecting all forms of determinism. If his conclusions are very composite, they nonetheless represent a radical rupture with the dominant positivist thought by refusing the scientism of the laws of nature (Dostaler, 1998, 2001).

Hayek’s method lies in a radical rejection of the logical positivism of the Vienna circle3 and in the idea that reason is the central force in transforming social order. His work on the theory of knowledge is of primary importance in understanding the question of the state:

1 On the discipline level, he considerably widens the field, refusing the reductio ad economicam of neo-classical economics, extending it to include the domain of moral philosophy.


2 On the epistemological level, he bases his rejection of the logical positivism on the liberalist humanist source — the origins of which are found in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

3 His liberalism confronts the axiological neutrality of the neo-classical approach and its mathematical formalism, which claim to discover deterministic laws in economics which guide the adaptation of institutions.

Hayek’s preoccupation centres on two questions: ‘Does the state build the social side?’ and ‘what is the interaction between the institutional framework that it defines and the actors’ role?’

He distinguishes the state as an institution from the state as an organization and sees in the confusion of the player’s interests and the law-making interest a danger for political liberty. The state cannot be an end in itself and must be subjected to a higher authority. Hayek makes explicit reference to Thomism: official authorities are not in themselves a source of legitimacy, they need to refer to a higher-level author-ity, sheltered from the contingencies of the democratic state’s politicians, in the same way as the institutions born after the English revolution in 1688 did.

Hayek’s project is to replace a government by men with a government by laws. The electoral system is no guarantee against tyranny, it is only a means. Democracy con-ceals a danger: the coercion of the majority over the minority. He questions the social contract as conceived by Rousseau: The National Assembly is neither the sovereign nor an expression of a pre-existing social contract reflecting the nation’s will. From that point on, the highest state authority must have no coercive power, and only serve to remind people of, and to safeguard, the law. He suggests that it be composed of mature, experienced citizens, over the age of 45, who are supposedly wise.

In his opposition to positivism, Hayek only conceives of society as ‘a building with-out an architect’, which is a spontaneous result of non- intentional actions. He thus denies the existence of ‘laws’ and the sense of development of history which would be exogenous to human activity. Hayek goes as far as rejecting the concept of ‘soci-ety’ as a fruit of positivist rationalism and as a desire for the coercion of individuals over other individuals against which the Hayekian State has to fight.

The construction of society obeys an endogenous principle for spontaneous order, positive law being the codification of perceived regularities. This spontaneous order is the product of experience which develops ‘habits and institutions which have succeeded in their own sphere and which have become, in their turn, the foundation of the civilisation we have built’.4

The motor of this progress is the bounded rationality5 of individuals which leads them to look for coordination mechanisms which, while conserving the liberty of the decentralised actors, gives them information about the state of equilibrium of the sys-tem as a whole. Such is the role of the price mechanism that Hayek considered only as a method of managing information between the whole and the actor. The market is not, for Hayek, a ‘law of nature’, but an efficient mechanism for sharing information which contributes to reducing the bounded rationality of the actors. His views counter the tendency of economic theory to attempt to quantify the way the world operates. He was unable to obtain a position in the Economics Department of the University of Chicago because of his growing opposition to the increasingly abstract mathemati-


cal model-building tendency of economic science. He became a Professor of Moral Science, like Adam Smith.

But Hayek came across an aporia.6 His aim was to conceive of a society based on liberty, defined by an absence of coercion, even though it is impossible to abolish it completely. From here comes the necessity of the state, which is a central institution in the Hayekian system: it must have a coercion monopoly, in the sense of the mon-opoly of legitimate violence outlined by Max Weber, whom Hayek admired in spite of the fact that he belonged to the German historic school. This coercion monopoly has to be law in order to avoid the coercion of men over other men. But as the state cannot be an end in itself, it must be subjected to the law that controls it. In order to ensure his closed system, Hayek needs a vault key which is neither the market pro-cess, nor positive law. He invents ‘general laws’ which are in the same position as the natural law of classical political philosophy, from a moral standpoint, sheltered from human positivist rationality and having a coercive nature.

From this point on, this moral law calls on either metaphysics, in the sense of a hidden God guiding men’s actions towards good,7 or a wise legislator guided only by morality, decreeing general rules in public law which act as a complement for a spon-taneous order in private law which the judge has to make people respect: ‘an order that has not been put together by somebody and which is not based on commandments indicating what individuals should do (. . .) The judge must establish rules which have never been formulated, nor practiced before’ (Hayek, 1980: 114–121).

Law is, for Hayek, the product of a process of natural selection. It is not created, contrary to what juridical positivism states: ‘We should first liberate ourselves totally from the false idea that a society may first exist and that afterwards it is capable of forming its laws’ (Hayek, 1980: 114). Law and the judge thus appear as a deus ex machina which guarantee harmony in the whole of the spontaneous order.

The vault key of the Hayekian system is therefore composed of a non-positive right, resulting from a process of evolution. But nothing is said about the selection criterion which is at work in the process, which is either of a metaphysical nature for the ‘general laws’ of public law, or returns towards the utilitarian principles which it counters and which supposes that an agreement exists between utility and morality8 in private law.

Hayek fails to approach the problem of political philosophy, that of wisdom and ‘good society’. Raymond Aron brings up this aporia in the conclusion of his laudatory commentary to The Road to Serfdom:

I have always had difficulty, personally, in believing that morality and utility, through some pre-established harmony, fully coincide (. . .) I do not refute my admiration for Hayek’s theory, but I reserve my faith in it. The Liberals sometimes have a tendency, like the Marxists, to believe that world order could reconciliate our aspirations with reality.9

Hayek uses the intellectual method and the theory of knowledge, and not the question of the State versus the market; the demarcation line is no longer between liberal economists and the partisans of the state but between positivists and non-positivists.

Hayek leaves us with two questions for research:


l To which order does the interaction of decentralised actors relate, and are the intentional action of institutions possible within a rationality logic limited to actors, and

l To which non-positive law can the state be subjected to, in order to play its role of protecting the liberty of actors and of researching a process of information sharing?

Determinism revisited: the ergodic hypothesis

Abandoning determinism exposes us to a danger: that of integral cognitive relativism, the negation of reason. We have to navigate between two pitfalls: passive or active obedience to a supposed ‘sense of history’ and the total negation of historic institu-tional and organisational regularities, which lead us to believe that ‘all is possible’. ‘The Future is open’ declared Karl Popper (1988), but that does not mean that we can do anything and everything. Only the method of formulating and refuting hypotheses will permit us to fix the demarcation line between the scientific and pseudo-scientific approaches. Here we are talking about ‘technological social sciences’ that Karl Popper refers to in The Poverty of Historicism: prediction may forecast at regular intervals hurri-canes coming from a specific direction, technological and social engineering will allow us to take the necessary decisions to reinforce our structures and prepare people.

But does this in itself deny the possibility of taking intentional actions at an insti-tutional level? At this point we need to extend Hayek’s theory of knowledge, as done by Jacques Sapir (2005) and Douglass North (2005) by applying the ergodic hypothesis.10

Risk, incertitude, ergodicity

In a system which evolves in a stable environment, the art of prevision and risk man-agement can be practised using statistical support. According to an old definition by Hirsh, the risk factor is the one which can be calculated statistically and against which we can insure ourselves.

A system which evolves in an open environment is controlled by uncertainty: a multitude of random factors make its behaviour stochastic. To pilot such a system, we have to have access to the underlying principles, which govern it. Institutions can, in this case, reduce the incertitude by identifying the configurations that the system may take, by understanding the gap that exists between the actor’s skills and the difficulty level of the problem to be resolved (North,1991).

In both cases, the system is ergodic because we can hypothesize its overall and future behaviour through understanding its behaviour at a certain moment. In ergodic systems, determinist methods can function. The institutions in an ergodic system play a role in reducing the uncertainty by expressing preferable choices towards which the internal stochastic behaviours of the system should direct themselves.

The evolution of institutional systems follows a continually changing trajectory (Rochet, 2007), either through a succession of foreseeable states separated by changes which represent the transitions from one technological cycle to another: the Kondratiev cycles, the business cycles of Schumpeter or even the techno-economic paradigms (Pérez, 2002). A public system is ergodic when it evolves in the same


techno-economic paradigm within which we can understand the main working principles.

When institutions no longer function . . .

From this point on the paradigm has changed and we have entered a new techno-logical cycle due to the fact that the practices used could no longer solve the prob-lems of a turbulent and uncertain environment. The behavioural system has become nonergodic: The institutions which permitted a reduction of incertitude no longer work: they must be reinvented (North, 2005). It is therefore necessary to access more profound underlying rules than those codified by existing institutions, which will allow us to understand the transition principles from one techno-economic paradigm to another.

This distinction is essential in order to understand the role of institutions:

l If the socio-economic systems had no ergodicity, our understanding of change would be reduced to hearing ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’ (Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Sc. 5) therefore denying any positive institutional role.

l If, on the contrary, ergodicity is total, as in the positivist hypothesis, observation would allow us to reach a scientific understanding of the world: this is ‘the positive State’ of Auguste Comte where ‘observation dominates imagination (. . .) and dethrones it’.11

In both cases, institutions are useless or, rather more, of secondary importance.The observation of regularities between institutions and performance in the long

term leads us to admit, using Samuelson’s vocabulary, partial and temporary ergodici-ties which are separated by periods of crisis (Sapir, 2005, Rochet, 2007).

From this point on, it becomes clear that the application of methods specific to the ergodical world to pilot in a non-ergodic world constitute a major source of failure for public policies. This is the main hypothesis in the recent work of Douglas North (2005): in a non-ergodic world the key competence becomes our learning capacity which allows us to reinvent theories underlying the conception of institutions.

The essential question is therefore that of knowledge

This is a function of our representations, more precisely of our representation systems based on our perception capacity, which may be perfect or imperfect.

1 Either we manage to reach a state of complete and intelligible knowledge of the real (the world of the theory of general equilibrium and the ‘historical laws’ of Marxism) or we adopt a completely ergodic hypothesis.

2 Or our knowledge is imperfect, and we achieve, according to the particular case, a statement of determinism which is partially unintelligible, and which can only be verified expost, a non-intentional result of intentional individual or group actions. This may lead us either to the methodological individualism adopted by Hayek that results in spontaneous order, or to situation where the state and the institutions play a role in structuring the convergence of the intentional actions


of individuals and organizations. In this case, we can identify local and temporary determinism, which can become useable through learning and progress in knowledge.

By introducing the ergodic hypothesis, we can surpass the positivist approach which assimilates an understanding of the evolution of the future behaviour of socio-political systems to that of their past behaviour and poses the question ‘Can the state be the initiator of political design or is it subjected to historic laws which it is proud to have given birth to?’.

The role of the polity: what is good government?

In the OECD report ‘Modernising the State’ (2005), it is only a question of ‘adapting to the evolution of society’. ‘Societies are constantly evolving’ and the state has to follow. In dominant political thought, the role of the state is reduced to management, and political economics can be summarized as making the policy of economics. The OECD’s report does not in fact deal with the state but with governance, presented as formal and informal set of rules that the OECD countries are supposed to have in common. ‘Good government’ is the one that respects the rights of ownership, peoples’ rights and the rule of law, with those linked to peoples’ citizenship.

The state questioning the belief system

In a non-ergodic world with an imperfect perception, the role of the polity is to stimulate learning and the evolution of mental models which are at the heart of the systems of beliefs. Erik Reinert, in his fascinating article, The Role of the State in Economic Growth (1999), shows that throughout history, the winning countries have had institutional strategies which represented a growth of knowledge based on the perception of ruptures in the long term.

When an institutional system based on an ergodic conception of the world is confronted by the non-ergodicity of reality and, by the awareness of its imperfect perception capacity, a crisis is inevitable.

Xavier Raufer studies this rupture in the urban violence context. On the one side he emphazises that ‘the diagnosis of the essential has been done’. But reports from the DST,12 the security branch of the police force and Customs warn the government about the degradation of the ‘difficult areas’ by traffickers of all kinds, and the dis-appearance of all feelings of citizenship in such areas. But there is, as Xavier Raufer emphasises, a ‘refusal to face reality’ on the part of the elites attached to their system of beliefs. ‘The responsible, since the ENA, relies in social engineering fanaticism, it relativises and looks at things from a superior point of view often with irony. Two decrees and a white paper ‘we’ll fix it’. In this way things have not only become insipid by the time they get to the top, but very often are in a terminal phase’ (Lagadec, 2000: 204).

In short, this refusal to face reality is the expression of resistance to changing the system of beliefs in place and the flight towards ‘more of the same thing’.

The characteristics of the statesman have not changed since Machiavelli (Rochet, 2008): he is the person who re-establishes politics in its dimension of permanent


refoundation of the city through the evolution of the beliefs on which the institutions are founded.

The necessary return of the polity

Hayek’s aporia comes from having looked for ‘general laws’ supposedly those associ-ated with wisdom. But where does this wisdom come from? Either it is metaphysical and of divine origin (which is implicit in Adam Smith’s work), or it is the result of ‘wise men’ for Hayek. But in his works there is no principle of political philosophy which could be used to found his ‘general laws’.

Hayek has made a valuable contribution by showing the impossibility of the lib-eral solution on which Hobbes, and especially Locke, built their conclusions, and by showing the necessity of the state as a condition for individual liberty facing the all powerful ‘society’. He fails on the question of legitimacy. This latter question has two solutions ‘either it comes from above or below’ (Gauchet, 2005: 21). Either it comes from a link, which transcends individuals, or it comes from the agreement between citizens bearing their rights: the process of adjustment between these two sources of legitimacy is in no way automatic (Gauchet, 2005: 26).

The return to political philosophy is the point to look for whereby the political life comes to be considered as the essence of human society, to use the distinction made by Marcel Gauchet between the polity and politics, the latter being simply the practi-cal organization of debate on the stakes of public policy in a democratic society.

The repercussion of the failure of Marxism and the success of liberal democracy was not the defeat of determinism and historicism, but the victory of its stereophonic opposite, democracy of the individual’s rights which changed from being ‘the rights of’ – fundamental liberties — to ‘the rights to’ — debts rights — in which the state has a regulating function in a society based on individualism alone. It creates the illu-sion of all-powerful individuals who ‘are enthroned masters of themselves, realising that they have no control over their destiny’ (Gauchet 2005: 28). It is to this mode of thought that the NPM developed its conception of the state as a ‘services provider’ in the face of ‘customer citizens’. Having lost the symbolic dimension of representing a political intention, it is just a practical example of administration, reduced to the role of a seismograph recording society’s movements. It becomes an essential functioning power which gives individuals ‘the right to no longer think that they are in society, but encloses them in a tightly and comprehensive network through a managing grip over the society’ (Gauchet, 2005: 431).

Could the loop be looped, will positivist liberalism lead us to the Leviathan of Hobbes that it was trying to avoid?

The only way to think about changing institutional and organizational structures when faced with the ruptures of the third technological revolution is therefore to revise the system of dominant beliefs, which is only possible through political philo-sophy.

With Leo Strauss, I support the idea that political philosophy must return to the status that it had before modernity: questioning the nature of a ‘good society’ and the common good. The question has to be asked ‘Does the Enlightenment extinguish what it sheds light on? ‘and we must ‘consider the depth of the crisis in the Western world and find the means to rectify what, in modern rationalism, is considered


destructive’ (Pelluchon, 2005: 14). For Strauss, the incorporating tension which is pres-ent in human societies is that which links and opposes Athens and Jerusalem; that is the unity and the opposition of government by laws and government by morals.

This founding tension must stay open and is by nature irresolvable: it provides public management with a thinking base for the definition of the legitimacy of public decisions and on the relationship between public decision and the common good.

The Fortunes and misfortunes of virtue in the birth of nations

In the series of frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1328) which decorate the Town Hall in Sienna ‘good government’ (see Figure 1) rests on the cardinal virtues of saint Ambroise (Temperance, Justice, Strength and Prudence) with Magnanimity and Peace next to him, and the theological virtues of saint Paul (Faith, Hope and Charity). But the key is Justice, notably social justice, which is supported by Concorde and the equal-ity which must reign between the citizens represented in rank, all holding a rope (a symbol of mutual understanding). The fresco emanates a feeling of equilibrium and harmony which is not the result of a natural order but of a political order built by man.

The allegory of good government is dominated by an imposing figure which is the incarnation of the type of ruler the city needs in order for the precepts of justice to be followed and to protect the common good (Skinner, 2003: 138). The ideal magistrate possesses the eight virtues plus the virtue that Sénèque considers to be essential to occupy the position of a supreme magistrate: magnanimity, or the capac-ity to ‘look disdainfully at all the minor preoccupations that the commoner chooses to the detriment of the more serious’.13 Each of the virtues is represented by nine wise men governing the town. But the eminent presence of the magistrate shows that no-one can claim to possess them all, that his role is to remind them and invite them to act, under the control of the people who elected him, for the pursuit of the common good.

From the Roman political philosophers (Cicero, Salluste, Sénèque, Tacite) to the prehumanists (Latini, Jean de Viterbe . . .); to the philosophers of the Renaissance, from Thomas d’Aquin to Machiavelli, followed by the English partisans of the com-monwealth (Milton, Harrington, Nedham . . .); to Rousseau and the founding fathers of the United States, there is, with perspectives that vary the weight given and the role attributed to civic virtues,14 a political management of the public entity (respublica, common weal, ben comune . . .) which can fall within the scope of moral sciences and which deals with the dynamic equilibrium between economic development and civic virtue, permanently being questioned by the appearance of new sources of enrichment, the lever of both prosperity and corruption.

The corrupting role of finance: the English case

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civic virtue is posed under another light by Charles Davenant who, while recogniz-ing the necessity of these wars, underlined the corrupting role of a permanent army and the appearance of finance as an autonomous sphere of activity. The humanists, following the line of Machiavellian thought, condemned resorting to professional armies as a source of corruption and only recognized the armies of armed citizens as virtuous. This was the case of the Navy whose role was totally complementary to that of the merchant navy, which was not a permanent army, the sailors moving from one corps to another in what was a model of good public management and performance both operational and institutional (Findlay et O’Rourke, 2008).

For Davenant, commerce is a necessary activity for England because it brings into the country resources which were necessary to maintain its power. But it represents a material and not a moral contribution. The trader must show, through his frugality, that he can support the war without being corrupted, by keeping the common good in perspective. Pocock (2003: 446) sees in this debate in England at the beginning of the 18th century the true source of the ‘protestant ethic’ about which Max Weber15 theorized much later. The question that the philosophers and the political polemists debated (Swift, Defoe, Bolingbroke, Trenchard . . .) is that of the opposition between real wealth and virtual wealth which depends on the development of credit avail-ability which becomes an economic activity in itself because of the appearance of public debt.

For Daniel Defoe and, in Whig literature, credit is described in an analogous way to that in Machiavelli’s fortuna, as an archetype of the instability of human societies subjected to greed and passion (Pocock, 2003: 453). But Defoe tries to show that credit can be useful for economic development: thus he presents it in 1710 as being a major force in the transformation of the world and of innovation assimilable to Machiavelian virtù. He shows that there is a credit ethic and that it can only be use-ful if it is respected. This ethic is not contained in credit itself — as later theories on the rationality of financial markets will claim — but in the moral health of society. The virtue is that of the real world and consists of eliminating the fantasy and irrational elements which subvert minds.

Jonathan Swift, the principal contradictor of Defoe, underlines on the contrary that the financial economy is based on opinion which replaces judgement and neglects real data on which credit is based. For Swift, there is from now on a dissociation between the material and moral composites of society, because, with the arrival of finance, the classical dynamic of Machiavelli’s virtù — fortuna — corruptio which pro-vided a theory of the dynamic development of the unstable system that is capitalism (Rochet, 2008, Collin, 2008), no longer functions. Defoe replies (Pocock, 2003: 459) that the world of passion and opinion can be disciplined by experience.

The financial crisis of 1720 obviously brought grist to the old Whigs mill, who considered finance as a source of irrationality whereby the public became interested in ‘bags of wind’ at the expense of landed interests. The South Sea Company was created in 1711 to manage the financing of the English public debt through the collection of private savings; an attractive renumeration, based on income earned in the South Sea colonies, was guaranteed. These guarantees gave birth to speculative rumours in order to attract investors, which far exceeded the real economic capac-ity of the colonies. The bubble burst and many investors, including Jonathan Swift


and Isaac Newton, were ruined, and this for Harrington’s disciples is an illustration of the neccessity of creating a link between civic virtue and landed interests. The Machiavelian opposition between virtù and fortuna becomes that of landed interests, (which at the time were based on land ownership) and monied interests (virtual wealth based on money).

The offensive was led in England by John Trenchard in his Cato’s letters (1720–1724) and simultaneously in France — affected at the same time by the Mississipi financial bubble burst and the bankruptcy of John Law’s system — led by Montesquieu in Les Lettres Persannes. But the public debate was much more animated in England where it lasted for a quarter of a century. Both Montesquieu and Trenchard assimi-lated financial economy to the ‘wind koopers’, which spread throughout Europe and are illustrated in important works devoted to the 1720 bubble including the amazing Tafeerel (‘the big mirror of folly’) published in Holland which represents the Wind Koopers as the incarnation of the madness of the time, and because of the power it exercised over the Crown, was the source of ruin for subjects and trade.16 These wind koopers had invented a mechanism that Hyman Minsky (1992) will describe as Ponzi schemes, and which consists of selling shares that one does not really possess and being unable to repay debt on assets and continually issuing new bonds to pay interest based on future and imaginary profits. (See Figures 2 and 3).

For Harrington’s descendants, the greatest danger was no longer the risk of the royal prerogative and absolutism, but that of corruption introduced through finance-mad financing, resulting in a loss of the common good and pushing members of society towards madness and frenzy (Pocock, 2003: 480) — the role is similiar to Machiavelli’s factions which were a source of ruin for the Republic. For Bolingbroke, this is now the essential demarcation line of the political debate, and the distinction between the Whigs and the Tories becomes obsolete: the line passes between the Crown’s part, or that of corruption induced from finance, and that of the Country, virtue and the real economy.

The exhaustive research carried out by Arthur Cole (1949) as well as the South Sea Company story written by John Sterling (1962),17 show that, on the one hand, financial madness discredited share holding companies and was the cause of the late development of capitalism in England, France and Holland, and that, on the other hand, the contradiction between financial capitalism and civic virtue had become the central problem in the birth of nations.

The difficulty is therefore that of clearly defining civic virtue and economic develop-ment, knowing that the latter has an ambivalent relationship with finance, as Hyman Minsky (1992) formulated in his two theorems of financial instability. There are two types of financing which generate two types of development: healthy financing based on a hedge financing capacity which results in stable growth, and unhealthy financing of the Ponzi type (Ponzi schemes), which the analysts of the 1720 economic crisis identified as the Wind Koopers (wind sellers). In the long term, this antagonism between economic development and financial speculation is confirmed in Carlota Pérez‘s (2002) work. For Montesquieu, commercial interest averts the political interest that Machiavelli tried to moderate with good institutions. But it is also a source of corruption:18 we must therefore find a source of virtue which is distinct from com-mercial interest and the development of the financial economy: political virtue which


is not an individual moral virtue but more of a public virtue, consisting of loving one’s country — a concept that Montesquieu assimilates to love of equality in the sense of isonomia, or all of society’s actors observing the same political laws.

The end of the 18th century appears as a new Machiavellian moment when the prosperity of society increases due to commerce but at the cost of the destruction of political citizenship. But at the point where Machiavelli would have considered that a strong government was necessary to manage the conflict between the prosperity

Figure 2 The Wind Koopers. Taken from Tafeerel (‘The big mirror of folly’) published in Holland after the 1720 bubble burst (Cole, 1949).


of the few and the impoverishment of the many, the Scottish Enlightenment, while admitting the negative effects of commercial and industrial expansion on the impov-erishment of the personality, imagined the future as a coexistence between progress and corruption. Rousseau was a determined opponent of this concept and he acts as the Machiavelli of the 18th century by envisaging in the birth of ‘the society’ the recourse to managing the inequality produced by the development and the pursuit of the ideal of equality amongst citizens (Pocock, 2003: 504, Manent 1987: 178).

The history of financial speculation from 1720 to 2008 reveals three constants:

1 Reason is powerless when faced with the madness of speculation and, contrary to Daniel Defoe’s hypothesis, experience plays no role since the same scenarios keep repeating themselves. Charles Kindleberger, in his history of financial crises (2000), shows that markets have learned nothing from the successive crises that have occurred since the XVIII th century, but, contrarily, governments have.

2 In order to come out of a crisis, there is a demand for State intervention in the name of the common good, which appears to be the result of rational reasoning when speculation drunkenness gives way to a hangover.

3 The role of morality and the relationship between the public and private good — previously confined to academic circles — becomes central in public speech making.

The terms of the modern and contemporary debate therefore began in the 18th century:

Figure 3


l Industrial and commercial activity is a powerful force in the transformation of society and in engendering progress, but its incapacity to eliminate financial madness is auto-destructive.

l Political virtue is the necessary product of rational action which must fight the irrationality of the Wind Koopers and reinstall the common good at the heart of the politico-institutional system.

The founding of the United States: the end of classical politics

Corruption in England was the main cause of the independence movement in the United States. The political and social climate of the American colonies in the 1760s revealed a ‘conglomeration of individuals made up of quarrellers and proceedurists who cultivated dissension’. Discord was general both between individuals and between the colonies themselves who did not hesitate to go to war. If the idea of independence advanced, it was because the colonists attributed the cause of this chaos to England who represented, in their eyes, a model of decay. The English had destroyed the very liberty they had gained during the Revolution through their obses-sive greed for wealth. For one of the principal figures of the American Revolution, John Dickinson, the cult of private interest plunged the English into a ‘domestication and a lowering of the spirit’.19 Dickinson tried to avoid separation with Great Britain, having understood the synergy between industrial development and commerce, which the union between the two continents represented. But the corruption picture present in Great Britain — ‘this nation which admits to the face of the world that corruption is an integral part of its system of government’ according to terms used by Patrick Henri who was the most virulent opponent of any attempt at conciliation — was such that all attempts failed.

Rejection of the British parliamentary monarchy implied, for the American revolu-tionaries, adherence to Harrington’s theory on the emergence, through civic activities, of a natural aristocracy of ‘self evident leaders’. Eric Lane et Michael Oreskes (2007),20 enthusiastic apologists of the American Constitution, present the victory of ‘liberalism’ (the inverted commas are necessary because this term was invented later and was not employed in debates at that time) as the logical result of the utopianism of Tom Paine’s doctrine, the charter of American independence, whose work Common Sense played a considerable role. For Paine, it was only a question of waiting for the emerg-ence of natural leaders after the declaration of independence in 1776: his theory failed because disorder was growing in the young America. But, as Christopher Lasch (2006:210) pointed out, Paine cannot be qualified as a republican. He dreamed of a society composed of small, self-managed landowners who would prosper thanks to commerce. In Paine’s work there was no political theory of representation or govern-ment that could make him a republican. Paine’s utopianism cannot be cited to justify the rejection of the principle of republican virtue in the 1788 Constitution.

Gordon Wood (1979) sees in the very principles of political theory at that time the source of the failure of the republic. The people are considered as undifferenti-ated, while civic life that underlies the republican virtue supposes that differentiated functions allow people to become involved in city life. This was the main reason for Patrick Henri’s opposition to the new constitution, essentially these three words ‘We,


the people’ because he saw in those words an undifferentiated mass, cut off from their land, which could only delegate their power to representatives at the expense of direct democracy and the states. Apart from Noah Webster — whose political role is little-known compared to his role as a lexicolographer — very few Americans had read Rousseau, for whom there is no virtue in the designation of representatives: a people which is reduced to this situation is therefore not free (Pocock 2003: 519). For Rousseau there is an irreducible difference between the person who acts for me and the person who acts with me: that is the civic virtue. However, if man is not placed, by the Machiavellian institutional dynamic, into a situation where he can be virtuous, he falls back on his private interest which is the fruit of all his own interests whereas, for the Harringtonians, the meaning of the common good is the fruit of his reason.

For Wood, the constitutional choices made by the United States are ‘the end of classical politics’ which is translated by an evolution from republicanism to liberal-ism (Wood 1969: 562); that is ‘from the classical theory of the individual seen as a civic and active being, who participates directly in the Res Publica according to his means, towards a theory where he appears to be principally conscious of his own interests and takes part in government only in view of carrying them out, bringing only an indirect contribution to this mediation activity through which the government ensures conflict resolution, which is the only common good in this case’ (Pocock, 2003: 523). The Machiavellian distinction that we find in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, between plebs (the uneducated mass) and people (the citizens educated by the good institutions and the virtù of the Prince), disappears.

Alexander Hamilton will close in the United States the political debate that began in the 1690s in England with the birth of commercial society.21 For Hamilton, the future of the United States lies in power because the passage from virtue to com-merce, contrarily to Harrington’s compromise atempt and Montesquieu’s theories, will not be pacifist. The interests of commercial nations are not complementary, there can only be wars hence the necessity of having a strong central government sit-ting on stable fiscal revenues. Although Hamilton celebrated the nascent commercial prosperity of the United States, his aim was not economic, but political. He looked much more to the East, and industrial Europe, than to the West to conquer, and used the major European monarchies as a reference to make the United States, in the words of the President John Adams’ address to Congress in 1796, ‘the most free and most enlightened nation in the world’, incorporating both the heritage of the Enlightenment and of the recipes for power of the European nations. Whence his proposition in his Report on Manufactures (1791) to reproduce the recipes of the all-powerful England: creating a public debt, a national bank, customs duties and political and mercantile protectionism in order to develop national industry. The Republicans, with Jefferson at the top, but also the Federalists like Madison from whom he will break away, can see the same scenario of corruption in British institutions reappear-ing, but, while they share the same preoccupations concerning support for economic development, they have no alternative to offer. Hamilton’s plan was adopted, even by his oldest adversaries (Irwin, 2003), but, however pertinent it was in ensuring economic development, it introduced the problem of corruption at the heart of the functioning of American institutions and, of course, the cycle of crises — the first of which occurred in 1839 (Wallis, 2004). In any event, by 1815, the ideal of the United


States as an Enlightenment nation and the incarnation of the republican ideal had completely palled (Gordon, 2009).

Thus the situation that Jean-Claude Michéa calls ‘The empire of the least bad’ (2007) is confirmed and replaces the stormy and demanding republican liberty concept: a type of society which, in the manner of the Hegelian slave ‘who at a decisive moment trembles for his life and prefers life to heroic death’, will make selfpreservation the first and unique aim of the individual. We no longer need to appeal to people’s virtue nor to their capacity of discerning between good and bad, since market laws, and the reign of rights, supposedly regulate the pacified existence of commercial life. In the language of English liberalism, every demand concerning the individual becomes, according to the founding concepts of Isaïah Berlin, ‘positive liberty’, associated with Hobbes’ Leviathan and with all types of suspect interventionism, inspired by authors ranging from Rousseau to Lenin, to which ‘negative liberty’ is opposed — that is a liberal concept of absence of constraint on the part of the state: it is the quantity of authority which predominates, like the coercion on individual liberty, and this regard-less of the type of political regime.

The Political Philosophy of the Republic: a renewal of the Euro-Aatlantic debate

New literature on the role of the state (Rochet, 2007 and 2008, Reinert, 2007) under-lines the extent to which commercial and industrial development never ceased to be a political process and that the key to the evolution of nations is the role of the state.

Managing change in the state is not therefore a technical problem of ‘good gov-ernance’ but necessitates a far more global approach, that of the moral sciences, which are, according to Durkheim’s definition, ‘the sciences of the human spirit’.22 The rebirth of a contemporary Euro-Atlantic republicanism (Skinner, Pettit, Spitz, Viroli . . .) allows us to go beyond the opposition between Berlin’s positive and negative liberty: The republican conception of liberty permits the combination of protection against the arbitrary behaviour of the state, by renewing the tradition of civic humanism for which liberty and law, state and economic performance, individualism and the feel-ing of common good are no longer opposed but represent two poles of the same dynamic.

The debate on the construction of society around the common good is not there-fore exclusively inherited from the French Revolution: in the last third of the 19th century, in an England at the height of its fame but nevertheless engaged in a phase of declining returns in the third technological cycle, the debate on the role of public power occupies the totality of political philosophy as seen in the works of Bosanquet or Hobhouse,23 who are as concerned about general interest as their French col-leagues are (Spitz, 2005:42).

Abandoning the positivist position for an evolutionist position implies abandoning a vision of the state either as the founder of the laws of history and where the liberty of the actor is denied (the maximal State), or as the manager of market failures (the minimal State), for a State capable of intentional action. The purpose and the legiti-macy of the action of the state becomes the key question: at the heart of classical political philosophy, the central question is therefore that of the common good.


What is the common good?

What institutions have in common is an autonomy which is at the heart of their evo-lution and which is clearly founded by Machiavelli (Discours sur la première décade de TiteLive):

l The politician’s mission is to provide impetus for a dynamic of virtuous action- the prince’s virtù which modifies a people’s destiny.

l The politician has his own dynamic guided by the ultimate ethical criterion which can permit him to free himself from common moral principles

l The politician’s objective is the common good — the ultimate depositary being the people, who are the only ‘defender of peace’ in the Marsilus of Padua sense, faced with the altercations of the powers-that-be which, if left to their own means, would not be subjected to any law.

The question of the legitimacy of power is central and is related to the common good, as well as to the interaction between citizens and the State as a means of validating the objectives and building a legal framework in agreement with the legiti-mate ends. For Machiavelli, this dynamic cannot be maintained in a republic (Rochet, 2008).

During the German occupation in 1941, a Jesuit father, Gaston Fessard, in the first underground publication of Témoinage Chrétien, published an editorial ‘France, prends garde de perdre ton âme’ (France, be careful — do not lose your soul) in which he expressed his opposition to the doctrine of the Catholic hierarchy swear-ing allegiance to Pétain’s government. Fessard developed the theory of the ‘slave prince’ who differs from the Machiavellian prince in that he is unable to lead the spiritual battle for the good of his people. If Pétain’s government was legal,24 it was illegitimate because it no longer pursued the common good. It was solely an admin-istration able to ensure the first level of the common good, material goods, and not the ‘superior common good’, that of morals and values.25 Fessard was a Germanist who had studied the Hitlerian mystic and had understood that it was a question of a spiritual battle that aimed to destroy the heart of the humanist tradition — France’s very identity.

French administration experienced the same dilemma, but, with many exceptions, faced the problem with less determination. In his study of French administration under Vichy, Marc Olivier Baruch (1997) concluded that Weberian rationality played its role: Maréchal Pétain’s historical charisma conferred an unquestionable a priori legality to the regime and the routine of administrative procedures did the rest: civil servants could take refuge behind these ‘innocent institutional mechanisms’26 and thus avoid a conscientious revolt.

Upon Liberation, Gaston Fessard (1944) summarized his thoughts in a work on ‘authority and the common good’ which defines the dynamic of the common good in a way that is particularly operational for public management:

1 Sharing of the good: either it is a question of natural collective goods, or the question concerns a voluntary decision whereby people can benefit from large scale projects or positive externalities (for example, transport infrastructure). This is the founding principle of public services.


2 The community of the good: is the good for the whole community? Understanding this question is essential for public services which are submitted to Gresham’s law: the public targeted is replaced by the better educated public, on the margins of the target, who can better handle administrative opportunities. Many public services offer ‘the juridical capacity to do things’, but are not based on the effective capacity — in a practical and cognitive way — of the population.

3 The goodness of the common good, which is the systemic effect of the common good. Is the sharing of the good superior to the sum of the goods shared? This criterion is essential in order to distinguish the particular common good from ‘common goods’.

The dynamic of the common good: extends from knowledge to the public decision

The common good is not only entrusted to the discernment capacity of individuals. It emerges from the practice of civic virtues employed by the rulers — Machiavelli’s vivere politico which encourages citizens to behave well. The common good emerges from the interaction between people and rulers, which is illustrated in the comment below Lorenzetti’s main fresco:

Wherever the sacred virtue of Justice reigns It calls for the unification of many souls And having united them It permits the signor to create a common good for all27

The common good is therefore the source of the legitimacy of decisions. Leo Strauss distinguishes very clearly between legality and legitimacy. We have no guar-antee that our laws are just ‘they can very well be the work of idiots or rogues’ (‘Droit Naturel et Histoire – Natural Right and History’ — hereafter referred to as DNH-:99). Legality is only legitimate if it serves the common good. But the common good can-not be conventional, whereas laws are naturally so. They can only be seen as an interpretation of what is just hic et nunc. What is ‘just’ varies in each case, in each city and can’t be a result of scientific knowledge, and not even of sensitive knowledge. So ‘determining what is just in each case, that is the role of art and political skilfulness, which can be compared to a doctor’s skill which involves prescribing in each case what is good for the health of the human body’ (DNH: 100). The common good is an emerging reality which results from the confrontation of options thought public debate at the heart of a controversial space which is historically the Nation-State (Rochet, 2001). But is it possible for the common good to be ‘anything’?

For Strauss, the polity is guided by his consciousness of the whole: ‘prior to any perception of particular things, the human soul must have a vision of the ideas, a vision of the articulated whole’ (DNH:119). But this ‘whole’ is by definition inacces-sible and our perception of this whole is only a simple opinion because we only have partial visions which are ‘inadequate articulations of the fundamental awareness of the whole’.

This tension about everything is a translation of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, between a society ruled by laws and a society ruled by perfect morality, which is the motor of political life. It is a vector in the evolution of beliefs, since politi-cal philosophy does not know and does not direct, but in Socrates’ manner, it does


ask the fundamental questions about the meaning of public action and good society. Political philosophy is more modestly an attempt to pass from opinion to knowledge (Tanguay, 2004: 193): ‘Civil life requires a funamental compromise between wisdom and folly, and this means a fundamental compromise between the natural right that is discerned by reason or understanding and the right that is founded on opinion alone. Civil life requires the dilution of natural right by simply conventional right. Natural right would be like a time bomb in civil life’ (DNH:141).

The political good is therefore ‘that which suppresses many evils without upset-ting too many preconceived ideas’. The question of the common good must remain an open question in order to manage the compromise between the wisdom of the philosopher who does not act and the folly of the positivism of reason enfired by the all powerful technical and scientific progress.

The role of civic virtue

If institutions are, as North (1991) defines them, constraints imposed on human inter-action, the more society is capable of auto-regulation, the less the formal institutions have to intervene. However, formal institutions have a cost, which is translated by a limitation of liberty since they are by definition coercion, in transaction costs and in public monetary costs by the organisations that these institutions generate. This prob-lem is already present in Machiavelli’s work (Rochet, 2008): the republican State can only subsist if the whole of the people is virtuous, if it is not, it loses its taste for liberty and the regime becomes corrupt. For Machiavelli, a people is naturally good, it is not virtuous, it does not necessarily use its power to obtain the common good and civic virtue can only come from formal institutions (Rochet, 2008, Collin, 2008).

The question of civic virtues was rediscovered at the end of the 20th century by the ‘republicanist’ current born out of insatisfaction with the liberal political philoso-phy’s ability to inspire an attachment free from the common good (Lasch, 2006). This current posed two questions to the researcher: that of the exact nature of liberalism and what separates it from republicanism, and that of the exact role and the exact functional value of civic virtue in the functioning of a political system.

On this first point, we must discard a superficial criticism of liberalism which would oppose individual interests and the common good. Liberalism, contrary to Macpherson’s interpretation (2004), did not ignore civic virtues, at least in its origi-nal version in Adam Smith. As for republicanism, it is a meritocracy that cannot be resumed as an invocation of altruism and devotion to the public good:

‘Nothing is more founded on competition than the republican ethic . . . Charging man to evaluate his actions using the most limiting criteria of its realisation, turns them against each other’

(Lasch, 2006: 207).

The second question is that of the functional role of civic virtues once we have passed the incantation stage. In his impressive work The Birth of the Modern World (2006), C.A. Bayly emphasizes that the civic republican trend or the ‘virtuous republic’ was apparent throughout the 17th and the 19th centuries, even in the United States after the triumph of liberal individualism in the second half of the 19th century. Bayly shows that this phenomenon of the ‘virtuous republic’ occurred all over the world


with a revision of modern values over civic virtues and traditional ethics. Aristotle, whom the Italian quattrocento reintroduced at the heart of political philosophy, is interpreted in vernacular language by the Ottoman renaissance in the 17th century and then by the Chinese in the 19th century. Civic virtues were the groundwork through which the values of liberal modernity were integrated, thus making it pos-sible to criticize modernity and update traditional values.

The education of elites

‘For most of us, we have the right to say that we were good workers. Have we always been quite good citizens?’

Marc Bloch, The Strange Defeat, 1940

It was Machiavelli who put the role of great men at the heart of political philosophy, either as ‘founding fathers’ of the city, or as providential men who have come to straighten out a corrupt republic because the masses cannot by themselves transform their aspiration to virtù into concrete terms. But he also specifies that the state’s set-ting an example cannot hope to last if it is in the hands of one person’, from which comes the necessity for a republican regime which would permit elites to regenerate themselves in popular legitimacy.

The dynamic of the common good is therefore a source of renewal for elites. However, like any system, it has to conform to the homeostatic principle which makes it resistant to change for its own benefit and not for the common good. Despite the power of the self-justification mechanisms they are composed of, they are nonethe-less subjected to the principle of Schumpeterian creative destruction: either they are animated by Machiavellian virtù — that is the desire not to take into consideration personal interests and security, the desire to only leave space for the defence of the country’s glory and liberty (Skinner, 2000: 117) — and they act as a model for the people, or they remain attached to their position and interrupt the political regenera-tion process. At this point we enter into a process of ‘clerk betrayal’ denounced by Julien Benda in his famous essay in 1927. Christopher Lasch also denounced even more vigorously the elites’ abandoning of their historical task to stimulate the evolu-tion of institutions in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1996).

The spirit of finesse and geometry

The education of the elites has been under fire since the founding works of Michel Crozier, whether they belong to the public or private sector. Criticism of the French style of elite education goes back in fact to Tocqueville who, in the third part of The Old Regime and the Revolution, underlined the influence of arts scholars on the formation of the public spirit in the 18th century, with the drift towards abstraction and a contempt for the real outcomes that it had induced.28 This shortcoming is far from being limited to the French administrative style. In Voltaire’s Bastards (1993), the Canadian John Saul denounced the damage caused by positivist rationalism in western elites. Leo Strauss’s radical criticism of modern political science is starting to be considered: ‘new political science looks at political things from the outside, from the neutral point of view of the foreign observer . . . it considers human beings in the


way an engineer would consider materials destined to be used for the construction of a bridge’ (1990: 298). The fundamental vice of modern political science is, for Leo Strauss, its value relativism, which means that it cannot admit that something like the common good exists. The result is a political confiscation on the part of the experts of the system of beliefs in place, which ineluctably leads to the death of the social body that is disinterested in virtù, and consequently corruption of the ‘political body’.

In order to distinguish ourselves from the dominant tendency in education, which tends to be reduced to the acquisition of ‘skills’, we can distinguish education from instruction. Instruction is what Leo Strauss called ‘liberal education’, that which ‘consists of learning to listen to small voices and consequently becoming deaf to loudspeakers (. . .) In the present state of things, we can hope for a more immediate rescue from the humanities than from the sciences, more from the part of a spirit of finesse than from a spirit of geometry’ (Strauss, 1990: 44–45). This spirit imposes a distancing from the deductive spirit in which Michel Crozier sees the power of the technocracy. Confronted with that we need to use knowledge at the base of any strategy for change so that ‘the scientific and technological communities are vigorous and open, so that relationships are faster and more lively between funda-mental knowledge, applied knowledge and its final utilisation.’ (Crozier, 1979: 171). Ethical education and a capacity to render the State as a space for controversy are the two axes in the education of elites which can make them capable of animating the process of institutional evolution and of countering their tendency towards ‘clerk betrayal’.

Recent research brings back to the fore the notion of Greek phronesis that Ambrogio Lorenzetti mentioned as the heart of the virtues of good government (Figure 1). The phronesis is this practical and immediate intuition that Aristotle opposed, in the Ethics at Nicomaque, to the universal intuition (Gueorguieva, 2004) and to theoreti-cal knowledge detached from action, sophia. For Hannah Arendt, phronesis is the essence of polity since it is the exercise of judgement by both politicians and citizens, independently of reference to a transcendent knowledge of an epistemic nature. If phronesis cannot be taught and cannot be acquired except by experience, the inter-action of institutions with organizations, and that of great principles with concrete problems can permit it to be developed. Phronesis is action, it is a practical art with-out which politics is just vain agitation. Hannah Arendt was one of the founders of the rehabilitation of the practical philosophy of phronesis: modernity substituted the ‘doing’ (activism) to action (depending on the aim), that is a process which becomes an end in itself, where the discourse becomes powerless and divorced from acts:

What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss. Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. (Arendt, 1983:260)


The management of organizations cut off from any discourse on institutions is therefore no longer ‘action’ in the way Hannah Arendt used it, but a taciturn process with no meaning.

Debate on the nature of institutions which only considers their formal, and even more, their juridical dimension, fails to consider the essential: what constitutes the foundation and the vitality of political society and its capacity to face change by keeping hold of its values: civic virtues. Virtuous elites, in the Machiavellian sense of the term, have to combine firmness and pragmatism in action in order to pursue the common good. Democracy, in this republican perspective, is not only a formal-ist procedure characterized by the vote, but a contention space where fundamental questions are debated and considered according to the stakes of what makes up ‘good society’. This exercise is by definition endless, and undoubtedly more demand-ing than submission to any ‘law’, of nature, history or economy.

Public management as a practical art

Padioleau (2003) considers the public manager’s skills in the practical arts of pub-lic action as the most important: management in times of uncertainty, the taking of risks, problem resolution, collective learning, strategic piloting and public debate. Developing practical arts in public management necessitates permanent revision of the knowledge base. If this is not done, they become stuck with universal ‘good practices’ in the purest positivist tradition, even in ideology, producing what Padioleau calls ‘perverse conservative reformism’ which disregards the link between the way of operating and the process of resolving the problems which it created.

If privatisation can be a solution for a specific problem at a specific time to counter-act a bureaucracy that has become unproductive, that does not necessarily mean that it is a good public management ‘practice’. Thus the privatisation of Railtrack was a significant failure, which cost the British Treasury more than the public company British Railways, which was re-nationalised implicitly through recapitalisation by emit-ting bonds guaranteed by the State.29

Forgetting that a practical art is only a practical art, a phronesis, and not a truth in itself, leads to radical mistakes because ‘perverse conservative reformism often puts in the same basket excesses in the reproduction of standard practices and immoder-ateness of artificial rationalism’ (Padioleau, 2003: 166). This ignores the link between ‘what’ and ‘how’ or what has been called the difference between ‘doing things right’ and ‘doing the right things’. And this is precisely the impasse of the World Bank’s ‘good governance’ indicators. Pollitt (2008) points out that they have a very strong ‘decontextualisation’ effect: the abundance of information gives the illusion of know-ing the reality, whereas both the researcher and the practitioner are in fact speculating on virtual realities that have no link with real life, which is made up of history, culture, relation to information and knowledge.

Public management, confronted by the uncertain world of the present techno-logical rupture, forces us to carry out a ‘strange loop’30 which leads us to a return to fundamental questions of meaning, non-fulfilment, and undicidable: those of the moral sciences. Public decision-making can therefore progress going backwards and forwards between political vision and practical arts, according to a process defined by Herbert Simon:


‘The idea of final objectives is not coherent with our limited capacity to predict or determine the future. The real result of our actions is to establish the initial conditions for the next stages of action. What we call ‘final objectives’, are really the choice of criteria selected for the initial conditions that we will leave to our successors’ (Simon, 2004: 290).

The final objective can only be an idea, a vision which becomes clearer as we progress, through different steps, in a process of problem solving. In this optic, public policy is no longer the art of conceiving ideal cities, but rather that of finding a way to progress through learning in the realization of the idea. It is no longer concerned with the precise definition of final objectives, but with the choice of criteria used in the public decision-making in an uncertain and risky environment. The choice of criteria is fundamentally political, in order to appreciate the good and the bad and to make a good decision.

These practical arts have two sources: accumulated practical wisdom, phronesis, and conjectural knowledge which face up to new situations, the métis of the Greeks, studied by Détienne and Vernant (1974). In a non-ergodic situation, it is of course the métis which will be selected first to confront ambiguous and disconcerting situations (Baumard, 1996). Practical arts ‘combine intuition, sagacity, prediction, flex-ibility of mind, dissimulation, smartness, vigilance, and sense of opportunity but the accent is always on practical efficiency and the search for success in action’ (Padioleau, 2003: 171). The métis is the opposite of the spirit of geometry, Détienne and Vernant define it as ‘slanted and wobbly knowledge’ which allows us to find our way through hazards while keeping our goal clearly in mind. If Plato condemned this form of intel-ligence of action and preferred contemplative wisdom, sophia, Aristotle made it the key to political success, which owes much more to a quick glance than to imperturb-able knowledge. But Aristotle takes care to distinguish métis which allows us to reach a goal, from phronesis which allows us to deliberate on the good, the former without the latter possibly leading to panurgism (Détienne and Vernant, 1974: 305).

We can therefore link the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ through a continuum of the pro-cess of creation and by up-dating knowledge and action, structured through the pursuit of a political goal: the common good.

We can conclude with two points:

l Setting up a diagram illustrating the relationships between the type of knowledge required for a public decision and a typology of situations (Figure 4).

l Defining a coherent framework for the education of elites by mixing this approach with the characteristics of the neo-Weberian state identified by Pollitt et Boukaert (Table 1)


Knowledgeepistemic basis

Knowledgeempirical basis

Managementpublic

Common good

Judge

Act

Feel

Figure 4 From ‘how’ to ‘what’, linking practical action and distant finality

Note: This diagram should be interpreted in the following way: Faced with a new situation, the abstract generalisations of epistemé are powerless, the practical wisdom of phronesis, which is the art of judgement, needs to enrich itself with new experiences which will be forged through the exercise of métis, which is the art of taking into account the context. In this case, the technologies of public management are not very useful. What the person in charge needs is much more instruction in terms of general culture than technical training on how to use the tools of public management which do not by themselves make sense. The practical art of action is the expression of métis – phronesis which is largely linked to character, and virtù, of the public decision-maker. In the training of superior officers, the Collège Interarmées de Défense (the War School) always places general culture and strength of character as one of the top qualities of an executive.

Conjectural knowledge

(métis)

Practical wisdom

(phronesis)

Knowledge‘What’

(épistémé)


Table 1 The updating of Weberian values

Note: Like all institutional arrangements, the skills employed will take different forms according to nations, obeying the principle of path dependency. Institutions are always, to use Dany Rodrik’s expression, ‘second best’, as there is no ideal universal model (Rodrik, 2008). But several invariants appear: moral strength, personal legitimacy founded on the sense of common good and practical intelligence which are therefore intimately linked and cannot be summarized as the combination of deductive intelligence and the statutory legitimacy of elites which have fallen under the empire of the spirit of geometry and have become ‘Voltaire’s bastards’.

Notes

1 See Synthesis comments on propositions, Christopher Pollitt, Tallinn, 31 January 2008, the conclusion of trans-European dialogue organized by the IIASA, http://www.cuni.cz/ISS-50-version1-080227_TED1_Pollitt_Synthesis.pdf

2 It has not always been so: after the first attempt to create a Ministry for Administrative Reform under the Fourth Republic which only lasted ten days (Paul Giacobbi in 1950), a real Ministry for Administrative Reform was entrusted to Louis Joxe, with the position of Secretary of State, from 1962 to 1967. This ministry disappeared between 1974 and 1988. It was given the name of Ministry of State Reforms in 1995. In other words, when the State played a real role and had a political strategy, we could clearly distinguish state from administration, and, conversely it is when the state loses its influence that it is reduced to an administration, which is confused with the political state institution.

Instruction: Values inherited from the Weberian model Education: new skills

Values that need to be updated:

• The State as an architect of political solutions for the service of the common good

• Public laws written and specifically seen as a consequence of the unequal relationship between the State and the citizen

• The statutes of the Public sector considered as a recognition of the specific values of public service

Skills related to an open and uncertain world:

• Strategic scenarios in a non-determinist environment

• Integrating the citizen: – in public decision-making – in the conception of services• A measurable and assessable logic for

the creation of values• Information systems considered as the

control mechanism for administrative reform

Values that should be abandoned:

• Hierarchies• Exclusive employment• The division of labour based on the

primacy of procedures

New values to be promoted:

• Redefinition of the roles, responsibilities and types of relationship between the centre and the periphery

• Development of a horizontal approach to public policies

• Favours mobility between the private public and the public private sectors

• Modular, evolutionary and resilient organisation of public management tools.


3 The Vienna Circle was a group of intellectuals grouped around Moritz Schlick, and which included Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Viktor Kraft, Hans Hahn, and Herbert Feigl, and which attracted a large number of well-known scientists such as Kurt Gödel. They aimed to ‘unify sciences and eliminate metaphysics as they considered that metaphysical propositions had no meaning. They were inspired by the conceptions of Russell and Wittgenstein and wanted to formalise scientific knowledge. Popper was opposed to the Vienna Circle’s philosophy, called logical positivism, logical empiricism or even neo-positivism. This philosophy was criticised by Popper in his first book, Logik der Forschung (1934), the logic of scientific discovery (1973).

4 F.A Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, reproduced in Pierre Manent’s The Liberals. 5 Hayek does not use this formula which first appeared in the work of Herbert Simon, but the

concept is already expressed ‘knowledge of the circumnstances that we should use never exists in a concentrated or integrated form, but only as dispersed fragments of incomplete & contradictory knowledge that all separate individuals possess’ ibid, p. 765

6 In philosophy the apories are difficulties which are irreducible in a philosophical question or in a doctrine.

7 For Jean-Claude Perrot in Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique aux XVIII° et XIX° siècles, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 1992, the ‘invisible hand’ is the expression of hidden God, a jansenist thesis found in a lot of liberal economists.

8 ‘The law was certainly not created to serve any great aim, on the contrary it developed because it made the people who conformed to it more efficient in the pursuit of their own objectives’ (1980: 135).

9 R. Aron, ‘The Liberal definition of liberty’, a commentary of The Road to Servdom, in Pierre Manent, op. cit, p. 833.

10 The observation, in time or space, of the properties of a part of a system permit the formulation of hypotheses about the proerties of the whole system.Ergodic systems only include states of equilibrium the transition from one state to another is statistically foreseeable. On the contrary, to understand the behaviour of a non-ergodic system, it is necessary to look at its inherent organizational principles or be able to situate it in a larger whole of systems whose behaviour caould be ergodic. The ergodic theory came from the chemist Bolzman’s work and its mathematical foundations were developed by Von Neumann in order to understand the behaviour of dynamic systems. It was introduced into economic analysis by Haavelmo and Samuelson.

11 ‘Positive political systems, or the treaty of Sociology instituting a religion on humanity’, p. 113, Paris 1854.

12 Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French counter-espionage agency.13 Sénèque, cited by Skinner (2003: 49).14 See Pocock, 2003 and Skinner, 2003.15 Recent research shows that this preoccupation started well-before.Giacomo Todeschini

(Richesse franciscaine: de la pauvreté volontaire à la société de marché, Verdier 2008) discusses the doctrines developed by the Franciscans in the 14th century to consider the contradiction between individual wealth and the common good See also Laurence Fontaine L’économie morale: Pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe préindustrielle, Gallimard, 2009, Paris.

16 Holland remained outside the speculative madness of 1720, mainly because it recalled the tulip crisis of (1636 –1637). But the Dutch had a lot of commercial contacts with London and Paris, had participated in the English debt, and had bought shares in the Mississipi Company. They therefore felt the indirect consequence of this financial crisis.

17 The South Sea Company bubble was the subject of a bibliographical research programme at the University of Harvard http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/ssb/index.html

18 ‘We can say that commercial laws improve manners in the same way that these laws lose manners. Commerce corrupts manners: that was the subject of Plato’s complaints’ id. XX, I

19 John Dickinson Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania’, 1787. Dickinson was not a simple farmer but the richest landowner in Pennsylvania who had an elaborare vision of the synergies between Great Britain and its colonies: ‘This is the grand importance of the colonies for Great Britain. Its prosperity depends on its commerce; manufacturing commerce; manufactures,


available markets. However, the most constant and advantageous markets are the colonies; in the rest of Europe, there are all sorts of interfering factors and all sorts of incidents that risk to endanger these exchanges’.

20 Ex-editor of the International Herald Tribune, and Eric Lane who is a professor of law. Their support of the American Constitution as a solution to the conflict between non-virtuous private interests and collective systems of regulation weighing the for and against, is particularly clear and well constructed, was widely acclaimed in the USA, and supposedly gave birth to ‘the greatest success in the history of humanity’, would merit further discussion outside the scope of this article.

21 First secretary of State for the Treasury, who believed in a strong state and an English style mercantile system, he was an enemy of Thomas Jefferson.

22 ‘Moral sciences are those which are especially concerned with the human mind. The method of these sciences needs to be examined. Four types of moral science can be distinguished: philosophical, social philological, and historic sciences’ Durkheim, philosophy lesson at Lycée de Sens, notes taken by André Lalande.

23 Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, London, 1869, and Leonard Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, a Criticism, London, 1926 (Routledge, 1996). Hobhouse, as opposed to Stuart Mill, does not consider that liberty is an aim in itself but that its objective is to allow man to develop.

24 France is the only example of an occupied country where a collaboration government was put in place legally, the Republic was abolished and complete power was given to Maréchal Pétain by the Chamber of the popular Front, with 71 percent of the socialist party voting in favour. This was not the case in onther collaboration government regimes like that of Quisling in Norway which was in no way legitimate.

25 ‘Acting according to the Common Good, would mean therefore for the “true citizen” forcing the supremacy of the superior common good over the elementary common good’, G. Fessard Au temps du Prince esclave, Harvill-Burton, 2006.

26 Pierre Legendre, in Jouir du pouvoir, 1976.27 Translation proposed by Quentin Skinner (2003: 139).28 ‘In both he finds the same love for–general theories, sweeping legislative systems, and

symmetrical laws, the same confidence in theory, the same desire for new and original institutions; the same wish to reconstruct the whole Constitution according the rules of logic and in conformity with a set plan instead of attempting partial amendments. A terrible sight! For what is a merit in an author is often a defect in a statesman, and characteristics which improve a book may be fatal to a revolution’. Tocqueville, livre III de l’Ancien régime et la Révolution.

29 The Economist, ‘Railtrack’s bankruptcy, Blood on the tracks’ 11 October 2001.30 The strange loop phenenomon is produced each time when, following ascension or

descension in a hierarchical system,,we return to our great surprise,to the point of departure’ (Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 12).

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No philosophy, please, we are managers

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