The legitimacy of impartiality and the legitimacy of reflexivity have been linked to the development of new democratic institutions, as we have seen. But citizens are also increasingly conscious of the way in which they are governed. They want to be listened to and reckoned with. They want their views to be taken into account. They expect the government to be attentive to their problems and to show genuine concern with their everyday experiences. Everyone wants his or her particular situation to be taken into account, and no one wants to be subject to inflexible rules. Around the world, survey after survey has shown that a central concern of people everywhere is that political leaders should share their experiences and consult them about what ought to be done.
There is a word for the new type of relationship that citizens aspire to have with their leaders: proximity. In the late 1990s, this word gained currency in France, where it came to denote a new and significant, albeit vaguely defined, political good. Suddenly “proximity” became a ubiquitous term applied to all sorts of public services, from the police and the courts to the health care system. No area of public policy seemed exempt from the comforting magic of this novel notion, which seemed to pop up everywhere.1 One prime minister gave it his blessing by calling for a “republic of proximities,”2 while in 2002 a law officially consecrated the phrase democracy of proximity.3 Often associated with the word participation and with a focus on the local level of government, “proximity” did not so much designate a precise object as suggest a preoccupation. For one thing, it indicated that the usual language and concepts of politics no longer seemed adequate to express the expectations of citizens. For another, it expressed in a general way the sense that distant, aloof government would no longer do—distance and aloofness being proximity’s opposites. Proximity was not only an expression of value but also the core of a justificatory ideology. Leaders appropriated the term in the hope of regaining lost legitimacy, while citizens seized on it to express their disillusionment and their hopes for change.4
To appreciate what was really at stake, we must examine critically the various elements that constitute the imagery and rhetoric of proximity. Only by deconstructing the ways in which the idea was used can we grasp the issues involved and the degree of success that was achieved.5 Among the connotations of proximity, three elements stand out: a variable of position, a variable of interaction, and a variable of intervention. “Closeness” implies a certain posture of government vis-à-vis society. Proximity in this sense signifies presence, attention, empathy, and compassion, mingling both physical and psychological elements—standing shoulder-to-shoulder, as it were. As interaction, proximity signifies a certain type of relationship between government and governed. Leaders are “close” to their constituents if they are accessible, receptive, and open. They also react to what they hear and are willing to explain their decisions, refusing to hide behind the formal institutional structure. In other words, leaders expose themselves, they act “transparently” under the watchful gaze of the public. At the same time, they are willing to allow society to make its voice heard, to have its views taken into consideration. Finally, proximity implies close attention to the particularity of each situation. In this sense, closeness means caring about each individual, taking the diversity of contexts into account, and preferring informal arrangements to mechanically applied rules. In the next few chapters we will examine these various dimensions, beginning with the last.
The public has a natural interest in the policies its leaders adopt. Similarly, individuals are presumed to be concerned mainly with decisions that affect them personally. It is therefore common to assume that an individual’s perception of an institution will depend on that institution’s impact on that particular individual. For instance, a driver will take a negative view of the highway patrol if he has been stopped and fined. A person accused of a crime will judge the courts on the basis of what treatment he receives. A citizen will judge the tax system in the light of her own tax bill. This way of evaluating institutions, based on the consequences of institutional action for the individual, is consistent with the very influential theory of rational choice, according to which self-interest is the key to individual behavior.
A series of studies done in the United States since the 1980s suggests another way of looking at the matter, however. A major study done in Chicago in 1984 focused on individuals who had been personally involved with the police and the courts. It showed that there was at best a weak correlation between individual judgments of these frequently challenged institutions and the nature of the sanctions they imposed. Although “satisfaction” obviously depended primarily on the verdict handed down, an individual’s view of the legitimacy of the justice system depended rather on that person’s perception of the fairness of the process. Other work by the same team of researchers, headed by Tom Tyler, confirmed the finding that the legitimacy of the system was essentially a function of whether its agents were perceived as having obeyed the dictates of “procedural justice”.6
According to Tyler, three main elements go into creating this sense of procedural justice.7 First, participation: respondents judged that a procedure was fair if they played an active part in the process. Was their point of view taken into account? Were they listened to attentively? Were they allowed to develop their arguments fully? Second, the feeling that rules were not applied mechanically and that the particular features of each situation were considered was also crucial. In addition, the impartiality and objectivity of decision-makers was a key determinant of perceived procedural fairness. Third, the perception of fairness was closely correlated with the way in which people felt they were treated. Did the agents of the system with whom they had to deal treat them politely and with respect? Were their rights adequately considered? Were they treated as full members of the community? When these various conditions were satisfied, people were much more willing to accept a decision, even if it went against them.
Another finding by the same researchers should also be mentioned. It bears on a narrower question: in civil conflicts, people prefer to settle disputes informally, through mediation, rather than by lawsuits, even though legal proceedings offer more substantial formal guarantees. This preference has to do with the fact that in informal procedures the parties can participate more effectively and flexibly. They also gain confidence that all the facts of the case, including private motives and unusual circumstances, will influence the final decision. Perceived attention to particularity is therefore a crucial variable in the constitution of legitimacy.
The contribution of perceived procedural fairness to the sense of legitimacy has been confirmed by other research on various institutions, including schools and firms. For instance, studies of police-community relations have shown the importance of this variable in a particular sensitive area of governmental action.8 These studies systematically confirm that the perceived legitimacy of the police depended on how individuals judged police behavior toward themselves and others. This mattered far more than the actual efficiency of the institution. The willingness to grant legitimacy to an institution is important because it conditions the behavior of citizens. People who perceive the local police as legitimate are more inclined to cooperate with officers, more willing to broaden their powers, and more likely to obey the law. Efficiency and legitimacy are therefore closely related.
With these findings in mind, it is useful to take another look at the question of democratic governability. The data suggest that when it comes to citizen satisfaction, outcomes are not the only explanatory variable. The data also show that decisions that are unpopular in the short run are likely to be accepted in the long run if the process leading to them is judged to be fair.
Other studies call attention to another key point: the influence of different explanatory variables on the perceived legitimacy of the justice system varies widely from one ethnic and social group to another.9 For instance, white, middle-class respondents ascribe relatively more importance to the results obtained by the police than to fairness of treatment. They even show a certain tolerance for unjust treatment of minorities if they believe that this contributes to a reduction in crime.10 Conversely, members of the African American and Hispanic minorities, who are daily subject to what they take to be police harassment (frequent stops, un-warranted arrests, etc.), attach greater importance to procedural fairness when evaluating the legitimacy of the institution. Because they are more likely to feel that they have been treated unjustly, they are much more likely to feel that their punishments are unwarranted. What this work shows is that institutions must develop qualities of impartiality and proximity in order to fight against discrimination and work toward a more democratic society. It also shows that these same qualities will play an ever more central role in multicultural societies. In short, impartiality and proximity help to foster good relations between citizens and institutions.
The combination of impartiality with proximity thus fleshes out the familiar idea of equal rights as the cornerstone of social coexistence. Attention to particularity is therefore a key indicator of the quality of contemporary social life, because it is a sign of citizen self-esteem and confidence of recognition by social institutions. For leaders it suggests a new approach to the art of government, one that draws on psychology as much as it does on sociology and social norms.
The research highlighted in the preceding pages points up the sources of social demand for attention to particularity. The need stems not only from a certain idea of the common good but also from the dynamics of the relationship between individuals and institutions. Why are individuals more willing to accept the decisions of institutions that they feel are close to them and treat them fairly? Because the treatment they receive conveys a positive message: they feel more highly valued.11 Dealing with attentive, fair, respectful authorities who listen to the arguments of the people they govern signals to citizens that the group accepts them as full members who “count” for something and are recognized by the authorities as having a certain “status”. This bolsters the identity of the individual in his interactions with the institution. He may feel proud of belonging to a society that treats its members this way. His self-esteem is thereby enhanced. The legitimacy of the government and the solidity of the individual mutually reinforce each other.12
This so-called relational psychological model explains the preference for impartiality and proximity.13 It also enables us to understand how a person can respect authority and feel that it is truly legitimate even though it has taken a decision that goes against the person’s interests. With respect to outcomes, individual and institution are engaged in what is potentially a zero-sum game (a positive decision by the institution may impose a negative sanction on the individual). But if formulated in terms of respect and identity, the game is always positive-sum. The second game explains why the first is reasonably well accepted. An institution that behaves in an attentive and respectful way can reinforce the self-esteem and identity of the people with whom it deals. In that case, we can say that the stronger the (proximate, impartial) institution, the stronger the individual.
Social psychology thus approaches the legitimacy of proximity by inviting us to distinguish between the content of decisions and the procedures that lead to them. And this leads to a reconsideration of the factors contributing to the popularity of political leaders. Popularity is not simply the product of an immediate judgment: how will this particular decision affect existing interests? (Such a view leads to the simplistic conclusion that a measure is unpopular if the “losers” outnumber the “winners”.) Outcomes do of course influence popularity, but procedural legitimacy also counts. The perception of procedural legitimacy can exert a strong and stabilizing influence on political support, independent of other, more fundamental factors. Procedural legitimacy is a kind of capital, whereas the legitimacy of specific decisions is more like a flow, which varies with time. (A government’s room for maneuver is jointly determined by both factors.)
The problem is that the relation between these two types of legitimacy has recently changed, for two reasons. First, temporary negative coalitions have become increasingly important because political systems are no longer organized around stable social classes. Hence it is becoming more difficult for political leaders to introduce reforms or implement measures capable of winning the consent of clearly identified majorities.14 The “flow of legitimacy” is therefore structurally fragile. But another factor is also at work: the acceleration and dissolution of political time. In a world of round-the-clock news and generalized transparency, the temporality of political action has become increasingly fluid. It is more and more volatile and fragmented owing to a social demand for immediacy fed by feelings of exasperation and impotence in the face of social opacity. The flow of legitimacy has thus become even more problematic: the government cannot control it.
The only way for political leaders to reclaim their legitimacy is therefore to build up their “capital”.15 Only then can they gain enough freedom of maneuver to attempt longer-term reforms despite the difficulty of maintaining continuous majority support. Building up such capital is therefore a key variable of political action. Establishing institutions that are attentive to particular situations and close to the citizenry thus becomes a top priority for leaders who want to shore up the foundations of democracy while seeking to make their societies more governable. There is thus a systematic relationship between citizen self-esteem and the reputational capital of political leadership.16
The term recognition has figured prominently in contemporary political thought since the 1990s. Charles Taylor, a philosopher who has explored issues of identity and multiculturalism, was the first to speak of a “politics of recognition”.17 Because he witnessed at firsthand the divide between Anglophone and Francophone Canada in the 1960s, he was quick to realize that identity issues were taking on increasing political importance. In the United States, the civil rights movement raised similar questions, though these were not yet formulated in terms of recognition.
In the 1990s, Axel Honneth’s book The Struggle for Recognition attempted to reinterpret many different types of conflict in this general framework.18 Honneth distinguished three types of recognition, each of which he associated with a potential source of conflict: love in the sphere of private relations, respect in the realm of law and politics, and esteem in social life and especially work life. In treating the concept of recognition, Taylor and Honneth both drew on Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit. Against Machiavelli and Hobbes, whose visions of the struggle for existence and the clash of interests they judged too narrow, and which led to a conception of the state as a power external to the human order, the young Hegel tried to point the way toward a less pessimistic political philosophy based on the dialectical transcendence of conflict. His idea of a struggle for recognition emerged from this context. Taylor associated this idea with the philosophy of identity, while Honneth, who succeeded Jürgen Habermas as the head of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, linked it to George Herbert Mead’s work on the social psychology of personality formation.
Both authors subsequently extended their pioneering work. Taylor delved into political philosophy with work on democracy in a multicultural society. Honneth published Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory in 2006. Other sociologists and philosophers have also placed the concept of recognition at the center of their work: for example, Nancy Fraser in the United States and Emmanuel Renault in France. Avishai Margalit’s The Decent Society also belongs in this group.19 More and more books on the theme of recognition have appeared in the past few years. It now occupies a central place in sociology as well as in political philosophy and psychology. This is because the quest for recognition is a “total social phenomenon of a new kind”.20 Vulnerability to humiliation and rejection now counts along with exploitation as a fundamental aspect of the denial of humanity.
The language of recognition is now widely used by social actors themselves to describe situations that they find intolerable. Workers protest or go on strike if they feel that they have been treated disrespectfully, just as if their material interests had been attacked. The words dignity, honor, respect, and recognition are among those most evocative nowadays of a desirable state of being.21 This terminology has become a universal touchstone of social, moral, and political discourse. The same words are used by inhabitants of Third World shantytowns and executives of multinational corporations, by urban youths subject to police harassment and factory workers who have lost their jobs, by disgruntled intellectuals and battered housewives.
It is not my purpose to survey this literature or summarize its conclusions. My point is simply that this language reflects the fact that particularity, in the various forms described above, has become an essential feature of our discourse about the economy and society. “Major social issues” are increasingly experienced as personal injuries. What emerges from this is a new understanding of what is considered legitimate power. In an age defined by the quest for recognition, power is recognized as legitimate if it is attentive to individual situations and makes the language of recognition its own.
The concept of care, which can be interpreted as “attention to others” or “concern for others,” occupies an increasingly central place in contemporary moral philosophy.22 It was forged by American feminists in the 1980s to characterize a value that they saw as specifically feminine. Taking an openly essentialist line, they contrasted care, defined as attentiveness to everyday situations and sensitivity to life’s details, with justice, understood in more formal terms as a system of rules (and judged to be more “masculine”).23 Debate revolved initially around the pertinence of this distinction in both ethics and feminist critique. It was strongly challenged because of the way in which the first writers to wield the concept relied on an implicit opposition between the domestic sphere, where attention to others was most clearly practiced, and the social world, which was supposed to be governed by more objective relationships. It was alleged that this could lead to a kind of regression by once again consigning women to the realm of the family. But the debate eventually broadened to include other issues. The concept of “care” was eventually liberated from these initial associations and established its influence in moral philosophy.
One consequence of this was the idea that human society cannot be based on the principle of justice alone. A different type of social relation must also be respected: individuals must be valued in their own right, for themselves, as subjects who are important to others and count as members of a group who are worthy of specific attention. It follows that the realm of ethics should be seen as comprising two complementary dimensions: on the one hand, just rules (the pole of generality), and, on the other hand, solicitous attention (the pole of particularity). To emphasize care was to focus attention on the second dimension, which had all too often been minimized or neglected. It is worth noting that philosophers who use the concept have generally relied more than others on sensibility rather than conceptual analysis as a means of deciphering social behavior. For example, Martha Nussbaum has called attention to the philosophical content of works of literature insofar as the complexity of characters and situations contributes to a specific mode of understanding.24 And Wittgenstein fought all his life against what he called “the craving for generality” and the “contemptuous attitude toward the particular case,” urging philosophers to attend primarily to the bedrock of the ordinary.25
The advent of an economy and society of particularity, along with the resulting social expectations, has changed the way people think about government. To govern used to mean to administer a territory, manage populations, distribute resources, arbitrate among interests, pass and enforce laws. Today it means increasingly to pay close attention to individual situations and deal with particular cases. In other words, politics is once again perceived as an art of governing. In order to see what a major change this is, we have to look back at the old democratic ideal, defined as a regime of generality.
For the Enlightenment, the only legitimate power was that of the law, that is, of a norm characterized by generality and continuity. Despotism was identified with the power of particularity (the arbitrary pleasure of the prince), while liberty depended on the generality of the law: generality of origin (a product of parliamentary representation), generality of form (impersonality of the law), and generality of administration (the state). The prestige of the law depended on this threefold equivalence. The law was at once a principle of order, which made it possible “to transform an infinite number of men … into a single body,” and a principle of justice, since its generality treated everyone in the same way, allowing it to function as a “dispassionate intelligence”.26 The eighteenth-century emphasis on the rule of law also reflected an imperative of rationalization. Rationalization of the state and perfection of the law were understood at the time as joint objectives. A good law was one whose application left no room for interpretation: “Laws must be so clear that anyone reading them can see the decision of the case he is looking for, and see it if possible in a way that requires no interpretation. Thus a good legislator should seek to reduce the need for lawyers”.27 In other words, the law was supposed to be the expression of general reason, embodying the two principles of rationality and generality. “It is appropriate,” the Abbé de Saint-Pierre emphasized, “to ensure that each law is expressed in terms general enough to include and encompass every variety of special case without exception”.28 In the wake of Cesare Beccaria, an ardor for codification gripped Enlightenment Europe. This conception of generality suggested that the law could be written in such a way as to subsume the whole range of possibilities, the infinite variety of special cases. Seen in this light, the drafting of laws was but one aspect of a more comprehensive effort to rationalize the world in which we live. The sovereignty of the law signified not only the advent of a state of laws but also the ambition of the legislator to subsume all other political functions.
Thus in the eighteenth century the idea of the rule of law in all its various dimensions was yet another invocation of the power of generality and of an order that was inextricably procedural and substantial (law as both norm and form). This vision partook of the utopian idea of a government capable of grasping and manipulating society in all its details. This was the ultimate wellspring of the political philosophy of the French Revolution. When coupled with the voice of the people expressed through the ballot box, this nomocratic utopia was supposed to result in a democratic “generalization of the world”: the full implications of the general will expressed in the balloting became apparent only when embodied in the “power of generality” emanating from the process. Procedural generality (universal suffrage) combined with substantive generality (the public interest) in the form of a social power identified with the law. This sacralization of the legislative cast suspicion on the executive, which was limited by its very nature to particular actions. The rule of law, identified with the sovereignty of the people, meant that executive power had to be narrowly confined and limited. The ideal was to reduce it to a bare minimum. The constituents of 1789 went so far as to reject the term executive power in favor of the more modest appellation executive function or authority.29
To be sure, one cannot view all of eighteenth-century politics in terms of the cult of generality alone. A glance at the Scottish Enlightenment is enough to moderate our judgment. Even in France, most of the philosophes fully grasped the fact that the ability to regulate social mores was also an important source of power. For instance, although Rousseau sanctified the role of law, he also examined in great detail ways to influence people’s behavior and habits. Indeed, to his contemporaries he was better known as the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile than of The Social Contract.30 But this political interest in mores indicated a concern with problems of governability as seen from the government’s point of view. The celebration of the teacher, which went along with this idea, was inextricably linked to a project of social control. The idea was that more effective government required the state to assume the role of teacher—an idea that was in no way integrated into a democratic philosophy of the art of government.31 The same point applies to liberal thinking about governability in the early nineteenth century. Guizot also insisted that the “government of minds” was a central issue in the modern world.32 “Power,” he wrote,
often succumbs to a strange error. Ministers, prefects, mayors, tax collectors, soldiers: it takes these to be the means of government. And when power possesses these means and has arrayed them across the face of the country, it says that it governs and is surprised when it encounters obstacles, when it discovers that its people are not as subservient as its agents. I say without hesitation that for me, these are not the means of government.… The true means of government are not these direct and visible instruments of governmental action. They lie within the bosom of society itself and cannot be divorced from it. It is idle to pretend to govern society by forces external to its own, by machines which are affixed to its surface but have no roots in its entrails and do not draw their strength from within society itself. My concern is rather with internal means of government, those contained within and supplied by the country itself.33
Guizot therefore insisted on the need to understand society’s opinions, passions, and interests in order to manipulate them. In other words, he intended to figure out just what it would take to govern the new individualistic society that was just then coming into being. He recognized that this was not simply a matter of establishing a representative system or a well-organized state. But all his thinking adopted the point of view of the state. His goal was to design new political technologies, not to formulate a new ideal of emancipation.34
For present purposes, the important point is that this approach to “governmentality” (the word was first forged in the 1820s) was not incorporated into democratic theory.35 The great thinkers who devoted themselves to questions of liberty and participation saw democracy only as a regime, so that nearly all their attention was focused on questions involving the organization of powers, the distribution of political rights, and the modalities of representation. The only people concerned with the other aspect of governing were those who were actually in government, for their own benefit.
Politicians in democratic countries continued to absorb a variety of “recipes” born of the practical experience of government. These dealt with such questions as how to curry favor with the public, how to promote one’s own projects, how to win power, and how to hold on to it. Though forced to confront the ballot box, politicians of the democratic era thus continued to think and act like old-fashioned Machiavellians, as if two separate spheres existed without any bridges linking one to the other. On the one hand, you had the public world of electoral competition with its rules of engagement, its sanctions, and its rhetoric; on the other, you had the submerged continent of calculations, deals, stratagems, and manipulations.
From the eighteenth century on, the old theories of raison d’État crumbled under the “reign of criticism” and the new insistence on transparency. Democratic and representative institutions insisted on public debate and declared platforms. But the everyday practice of power changed little, remaining as it had been in the age of arcana imperii. To see this, one has only to look at the works of the leading seventeenth-century advisors to princes. The reader of Baltasar Gracián’s Oraculo manual (1647), Gabriel Naudé’s Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État (1639), and Cardinal Mazarin’s Bréviaire des politiciens (not published until 1700) finds himself plunged into a world that is utterly familiar. Yet at the same time this literature is distressingly unscrupulous, treating cynicism as the most natural form of behavior and openly embracing the unavowable and unspeakable. It is exclusively preoccupied with the manipulation of minds, the art of dissimulation, the strategies of seduction, and the exploitation of credulity.
To be sure, the imperturbable amoral realism of these works was intended exclusively for the use of tough-minded rulers, extending the work of their contemporaries, the erudite libertines whose ratiocinations were pitched above the ears of the common herd. It comes as no surprise that Naudé was content to print only twelve copies of his great work, as if it would have been dangerous and inappropriate to give wider currency to a work aimed at “deciphering what Princes do and laying bare what they daily try to conceal with a myriad of artifices”. The fact that works of this sort were often dedicated to influential personages was not merely a matter of politeness. When they were reprinted in democratic times, the reaction was always mixed.36 They helped to educate the citizenry by disclosing methods that people often perceived dimly without fully understanding how they worked. In the preface to a new edition of the works of Mazarin, Umberto Eco observes that “you will find plenty of people you know from having seen them on television or having encountered them at work”.37 But the same texts have also been used frequently to present a conspiratorial image of power, reinforcing the idea that the world is run by some sort of secret government unknown to ordinary citizens and that the appearance of democratic processes is merely a veneer intended to conceal the way things really work.38
Systems governed by universal suffrage were thus impaired from the beginning by the wide gulf that existed between the idea of democracy, which was conceived only as a regime type, and the idea of government, which continued to be understood in cynical, predemocratic terms. Much disillusionment stemmed from this dichotomy. But things have begun to change. The new politics of particularity has given rise to new expectations and demands for fairness, proximity, and recognition. Citizens have therefore begun to think of democracy as a form of government. This has revived some very old questions about the nature of good government and the art of governing, questions that have lately been integrated into the realm of democratic thought. The old “mirrors of princes” are back in vogue, as exploration of the new democratic continent begins, and progress, as well as new pathologies, has begun to be visible.39
When citizens seek to make the actions of government more democratic, their first demand is that greater attention be paid to social diversity so that no one is sacrificed on the altar of abstract principle. Demands for impartiality and reflexivity led to the deployment of negative and reflexive forms of generality, which were to be achieved by seeking freedom from the forces of particularity. The new expectations lead in a very different direction. What has emerged is in a fact a new definition of generality as a radical form of immersion in concrete social facts and a determination to comprehend society’s irreducible diversity and complexity.
The new generality must be constructed from attention to the particular and insistence on proximity to social reality. It is thus a living generality, severed from the realm of rules and institutions. It is rooted in what we might call, with Aristotle, epikie (for which the modern word fairness is a far from adequate translation).40 Epikie is not an institution, a law, or even a moral precept. It is more in the nature of a social requirement, a practical virtue. It is rooted in the fact that every social situation is to some degree unique, and this uniqueness must somehow be taken into account. At bottom, this is what distinguishes the idea of government from that of administrative action or enforcement of laws. Whereas the word executive suggests the multiplication and application of some primary form of power, which therefore has no intrinsic consistency, the insistence on epikie serves as the basis of a new concept of government as something fully autonomous and distinct. Whereas the law always refers to some objective generality, epikie invites consideration of a different kind of generality, based on the search for a decision perfectly adapted to each particular problem or situation. Hence generality here characterizes behavior distinguished by close attention to the infinite variety of singularities that exist in the real world. Hence it clearly can do no more than suggest a regulatory horizon or, more precisely, a political method characteristic of the art of government. To be sure, it is not a policy in itself: epikie always leads ultimately to a political decision, which, in a world of scarce resources, invariably involves compromises. Although respect, impartiality, recognition, and proximity are public goods that everyone can share equally, the allocation of resources always involves choices. But these choices are legitimate only if compatible with the “democratic method” of attention to particularity.
This type of generality has become increasingly important in view of the social and economic singularity of modern society. Each individual wants to be heard, to have his or her problem recognized, to count for something. This is obviously the case in welfare states, where claims on the state have increasingly been linked to judgments of individual behavior.41 The blind application of rules is universally rejected. Mechanical decisions are perceived as inhuman because they treat individuals as abstractions and take no account of particular histories and contexts. What is more, the same type of criticism has recently been directed at the market. The harsh realities of the market offer the perfect example of a type of generality that is cold, mechanical, and insensitive to individual differences at a time when society increasingly wants to be governed by generality of a different type, one that is attentive to individual diversity and to life’s endless variety.
1 The literature is abundant. See especially Christian le Bart and Rémi Lefebvre, eds., La Proximité en politique: Usages, rhétoriques, pratiques (Rennes: Presses Universitaire de Rennes, 2005), as well as special issues on this theme from two journals: Mots, no. 77, March 2005, and Pouvoirs locaux, no. 62, September 2004.
2 The prime minister was Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who insisted on the term in his book Pour une nouvelle gouvernance (Paris: L’Archipel, 2002).
3 Marie-Hélène Bacqué, Henry Rey, and Yves Sintomer, eds., Gestion de proximité et démocratie participative (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).
4 Rémi Lefebvre, “Rhétorique de la proximité et ‘crise de la représentation,’” Cahiers lillois d’économie et de sociologie, no. 35–36, 2000.
5 It bears emphasizing that the term proximité is more suggestive in French than its equivalent in other languages (which refer mainly to the geographical and physical dimension, that is, to a variable of scale).
6 For an overview of these results and an introduction to Tyler’s work, see Tom R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). This is a new edition of a work that first appeared in 1990, and it includes an important afterword summing up thirty years of psychological studies of this issue. See also Susan J. Pharr, “Officials’ Misconduct and Public Distrust,” in Susan J. Pharr and Robert D. Putnam, eds., Disaffected Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
7 Tom R. Tyler, “Justice, Self-Interest, and the Legitimacy of Legal and Political Authority,” in Jane J. Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self-Interest (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1990), pp. 176–178.
8 For an overview, see Tom R. Tyler, “Enhancing Police Legitimacy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 593, May 2004; Jason Sunshine and Tom Tyler, “The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing,” Law and Society Review, vol. 37, no. 3, Sept. 2003; and “Moral Solidarity, Identification with the Community, and the Importance of Procedural Justice: The Police as Prototypical Representatives of a Group’s Moral Values,” Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 2, June 2003.
9 See the data in Tom R. Tyler and Yuen J. Huo, Trust in the Law: Encouraging Public Cooperation with the Police and Courts (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), esp. part 4: “Ethnic Group Differences in Experiences with the Law”.
10 Tom R. Tyler, “Public Trust and Confidence in Legal Authorities: What Do Majority and Minority Group Members Want from the Law and Legal Authority?” Behavioral Science and the Law, vol. 19, no. 2, March–April 2001.
11 Allan E. Lind and Tom R. Tyler, The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (New York: Plenum Press, 1988). See also Tom R. Tyler, Peter Degoey, and Heather Smith, “Understanding Why the Justice of Group Procedures Matters: A Test of The Psychological Dynamics of the Group-Value Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 70, no. 5, May 1996.
12 Christopher J. Mruk, Self-esteem Research, Theory and Practice: Toward a Positive Psychology of Self-esteem, 3d ed. (New York: Springer, 2006), and Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-understanding that Launched a New Era in Modern Psychology (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).
13 The author contrasts this “group-value model of procedural justice” with the “instrumental model” developed by John Thibaut and Laurens Walker in Procedural Justice: a Psychological Analysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1975).
14 For more extensive discussion of this point, see my Counter-Democracy, esp. pp. 175–189.
15 Tyler speaks of “reserves of legitimacy” in “Justice, Self-Interest, and the Legitimacy of Legal and Political Authority,” p. 175.
16 What Pettit and Brennan call the “economy of esteem” is therefore more applicable to institutions than to individuals (where “esteem” in their scheme corresponds to “reputation” in ours). See Geoffrey Brennan and Philippe Pettit, The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
17 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Amy Gutman, ed., Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
18 Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
19 Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Emmanuel Renault, Mépris social: Éthique et politique de la reconnaissance (Bègles: Éditions du Passant, 2000), and L’Expérience de l’injustice: Reconnaissance et clinique de l’injustice (Paris: La Découverte, 2004). Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
20 See Alain Caillé, La Quête de la reconnaissance: nouveau phénomène social total (Paris: La Découverte, 2007).
21 Richard Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality (New York: Norton, 2004).
22 For an introduction, see Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Sandra Laugier and Patricia Paperman, eds., Le Souci des autres: Éthique et politique du care (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2006).
23 The fundamental work is Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). See also Stéphane Haber, “Éthique du care et problématique féministe dans la discussion américaine actuelle,” in S. Laugier and P. Paperman, eds., Le Souci des autres.
24 Martha Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy,” New Literary History, vol. 15, no. 1, (autumn 1983), pp. 25–50. Note, too, that Stanley Cavell has linked much of his work in philosophy to the analysis of film.
25 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue Book (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).
26 Both phrases are taken from eighteenth-century French magistrates, quoted in Marie-France Renoux-Zagamé, “Royaume de la loi: équité et rigueur du droit selon la doctrine des Parlements de la monarchie,” Justices, no. 9, January–March 1998, p. 23.
27 Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Mémoire pour diminuer le nombre de procès (Paris: 1725), p. 36.
28 Ibid., pp. 30–31.
29 On the disqualification of executive power in the French Revolution, see my The Demands of Liberty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
30 On this point see the important work of Florent Guénard, Rousseau et le travail de la convenance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004).
31 Except for the idea that attending to mores was tantamount to recognizing social power of some sort.
32 François Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France (Paris, 1821).
33 Ibid., pp. 128–130. On this question, see my Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
34 That is why Michel Foucault paid such close attention to the origins and objectives of the liberal approach to government. See esp. his 1978–79 course at the Collège de France, Naissance de la biopolitique.
35 It is striking to note how few books were devoted to executive power compared with the large number of works on the representative system and the production of law.
36 It is worth noting, moreover, that the works were often first reprinted in small, private editions, as if to retain the idea that they were intended only for “the happy few”. But they have also appeared in scholarly editions. See, for example, the collected Traités politiques, esthétiques, éthiques of Balthazar Gracián, translated and introduced by Benito Pelegrín (Paris: Seuil, 2005), and the Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État by Gabriel Naudé, with a long introductory essay by Louis Marin, “Pour une théorie baroque de l’action politique” (Paris: Les Éditions de Paris, 1988).
37 The quote is from Umberto Eco’s introduction to Cardinal Mazarin, Bréviaire des politiciens (Paris: Arléa, 1996).
38 It is significant that one of the most famous pamphlets to adopt this style in the nineteenth century, Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Paris, 1864), which was intended as an unsparing condemnation of the government of Napoleon III, was chosen as a model for the sinister Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was presented as a denunciation of a Jewish conspiracy that was alleged to control the world.
39 For an overview of the way in which the focus shifted historically from the art of government to theories of the state and sovereignty, see Michel Senellart, Les Arts de gouverner: Du regimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement (Paris: Seuil, 1995).
40 This is an English transliteration of Aristotle’s epieikeia (see Nicomachean Ethics, V, 1137 b 5–30).
41 A good example of this is the way that the revenu minimum d’insertion has been managed in France. See my The New Social Question: Rethinking the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 211–216.