A Black Hole in Democracy?

This chapter offers a normative assessment of the political risks and diffuse democratic costs related to the blurring process, and considers its cumulative effects from the standpoint of democratic theory. It points at the role of the public sphere's autonomy as a critical condition for democratic citizenship. Because this gray area remains largely shielded from most forms of political and professional oversight, it has become a new democratic “black hole” in which professional intermediaries — lawyers, consultants, and so forth — thrive and prosper. When confronting this extraterritorial zone that has grown up at the core of political systems, and the corrosive effects of its expansion, democracies appear to be seriously underequipped. The blurring of the public–private divide not only weakens the capacity to produce a “public interest” that rests at bay from market asymmetries, but also the very ability to conceptually identify what such a “public interest” may be. This may be one of the biggest challenges ahead for neoliberalized democracies.

The Public-Private Foundations of the Neoliberal State

This chapter maps out the rapidly growing field of public–private brokerage by assessing the scope and breadth of French revolving doors. The media discussion stirred up by the so-called pantouflages — a slang word for the practice of civil servants and politicians joining the private sector — focused almost entirely on politicians and the rising risks of conflict of interests. It therefore failed to adequately reflect the breadth and diversity of the movement that started in the 1990s between the politico-administrative elite and major business law firms in Paris. By drawing a collective sociological portrait of these pantoufleurs, the chapter reveals a structural view of the new pattern of relationships that have been consolidated at the interface between the state and markets: the type of public positions and resources that are prized by the business bar, and also the type of companies and law firms that hire from the public sector, and the sectoral pathways followed by recruits. As we are able to map out the total social space in which these crossovers move, on either side of the public–private border, it is possible to sketch the field of intermediation and influence that has developed over the course of two decades of the French state's neoliberalization.