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The Tyranny of the Present appears as you announce a general theory of democracy, fifty years after your first book. Should it be read as a transitional work, or as part of a broader whole?
I have written two kinds of books: those that attempt to deepen the democratic idea—its history, its present, and its future. I finally feel ready to write my theory of democracy, which will be the subject of my next two books. My first book dates back to 1976; it has taken me fifty years to feel ready to write my theory of democracy.
The Tyranny of the Present sits within a sequence of works on public impotence and political disarray. I have tried to analyze this reflection along three modalities, which I called the “blind spots of public action and democratic life.”
You speak of the “blind spots” of public action. The first concerns the way we think about society itself. What does analysis in terms of material interests fail to see?
That is what I addressed in my book on society: the fact that we tend to believe citizens’ interests, their material conditions, have nothing to do with their passions, with what arises from their interactions. What struck me most were the Arab revolutions. They were often labeled the “hunger revolutions,” but as Leïla Dakhli has shown, the main demands centered on honor and dignity. Dignity means being treated differently by those in power, being listened to.
I thus explored this question of our blindness in analyzing society. We had only a classical class analysis, which is, of course, indispensable, but the other dimensions seemed to me essential. In France, it was the episode of the Yellow Vests that made most forcefully clear that if you confine yourself to an analysis of economic conditions, you miss a part of what fuels social life—and what dynamites political life.
What is the second?
It is the one I approached in my preceding book on invisible institutions. It is an idea I have held for a long time, partly inspired by an author with whom I did a thesis alongside Claude Lefort: Guizot. He argued that there are the inner means of government and the outer means. He explained that it would be wrong to think that having an army, a police force, and civil servants was enough to govern. He focused on the inner means of government.
I had taken this idea further by saying that there exist invisible institutions, which I later generalized and theorized. One cannot govern without recognizing that the legitimacy of power can either multiply or restrain its action, and that trust in those who govern also plays a fundamental role in the feasibility of certain policies. These three elements—the authority, the trust, and the legitimacy—lie at the heart of public action and democratic life, yet their importance had not been sufficiently recognized.
Time remains, a dimension political sociology long treated as secondary. Why has it become decisive?
If I was deeply familiar with classical sociological analysis and with power analysis, I was less familiar with this question of temporality. Yet I clearly perceived how decisive it is today, because a new regime of social opposition has appeared underground: struggles between generations. The class struggle long structured much of public action; it is the struggle of generations, a silent and unspoken contest that still lacks its spaces and is absolutely essential.
It is from this notion of generations that I was led to reflect on time. This book thus constitutes the third part of the analysis of the blind spots of public action and political life.
Your thinking dialogues with François Hartog’s notion of presentism.
I completely share the reflections he developed to refine this notion. I have studied carefully his various books on the subject, which have been references for me, even if, in my view, the essential thing is the most general approach. But if one wants to delve into the question of presentism, the terms in which he presented his three figures or his three modalities seem indispensable, even essential.
Where Hartog distinguishes several figures of presentism, you offer a more synthetic reading. Why?
If I simplified the analysis of presentism, it was to show, sometimes in a somewhat caricatured way, how it resides in our culture and has etched itself into our minds across these different dimensions. My aim was mainly to understand how to overcome it, whatever the conceptual precision contributed to this analysis and critique of presentism. My book is therefore essentially a book about how to exit presentism, how to fight against it.
You recount the history of attempts to resist presentism. What forms have they taken?
First, I tried to chart the history of these resistance attempts to presentism, considering that they largely fell under aristocratic, technocratic, or bureaucratic perspectives. Regarding the aristocratic perspective, I do not reproduce Tocqueville’s exact claims, even though the question would naturally require nuance. It is true, though, that in France as in England this aristocratic impulse was absolutely fundamental. The conservative perspective is evident; there is no need to dwell on that. By contrast, the technocratic path is absolutely essential, especially in our country, which prides itself on a high civil service.
France tends to think of itself as the land of the high civil service. Does this obvious claim have a history?
One forgets something: it took a century and a half after the Revolution to create a school of administration. The first to propose its creation was Talleyrand—and it was vehemently rejected. The same happened in 1848 with the attempt to establish a school of administration at the Collège de France. And until the Popular Front, socialists again rejected the idea of an administration school, arguing that it was unacceptable for a political world, by definition changeable, to be surrounded by an administration that was unchangeable.
What changed after World War II?
What changed was the emergence of a technocracy, tied to the very image of the Resistance. The first ENA students did not merely pass a lot of exams; they were resistors, notable young people. These technocrats were accepted because they were seen as resistors; they were not regarded as some intolerable superiority, but as the continuation of the Resistance into the administrative order. This is what legitimized technocracy, especially since the Plan’s role was crucial in France.
The Plan holds a special place in your narrative. What did it have beyond a mere expertise body?
Because, for the first time, it was not only the administrations, a technocracy, that reflected, but also the intermediary bodies. My first job was as an economic advisor to the CFDT after 1968, and one of my early duties was to technically coordinate the CFDT’s presence within the Plan.
In each Commission of the Plan—I myself participated in the Commission on General Economic Policy—there were representatives of the business world, various civil society associations, and trade unions. The making of public policy thus appeared as something that connected the whole of society. It was no longer just the technocracy; it even attracted a young technocratic activism. I recall that the brightest young finance inspectors aspired to be nothing more than note-takers in a commission. Now we exist in a completely different context. This experience forged an entire generation of technocrats in contact with society.
You also recall a largely forgotten episode: the productivity missions sent to the United States.
These productivity missions played a crucial role, what we would now call learning expeditions. Groups of about twenty people, mainly business leaders and unionists, traveled together for roughly ten weeks to visit factories and engage with unions. It did not erase the class struggle, but it allowed one to approach matters differently and sketch out alternative public policies.
How did this Plan-linked technocracy disappear?
The technocracy succeeded. And, unfortunately, this type of technocracy linked to the Plan was liquidated by the left after 1981—a paradox, yet for a very simple reason: it was Mitterrand who first shelved the Plan to signal that it no longer mattered, before eventually abolishing it.
The idea was straightforward: on the one hand, there were those who claimed there was no longer any need for the Plan, that the market could do everything; that was the liberal view behind its abolition. But there was also the political view that said: “We are truly a left-wing parties, elected by the people, so it is we who know what is needed for society, because we are left-wing elected officials.” When there were right-wing elected officials, it was fine to have institutions like this; but when the left is in power, such an institution becomes unnecessary.
Thus this long history of technocracy was interrupted in France. It is a real problem.
How did democratic thought, for its part, seek to incorporate the long term?
You can see that all democratic reflection historically aimed at multiplying the basic principles, that is, by elaborating representation. We thus created proportional representation and class representation, and we would also create the representation of the future. What I wanted to suggest is that it is no longer enough to transform institutions; we must also invent new democratic methods.
Democracy is not limited to a set of procedures and institutions; it is a set of methods designed to put society in a condition to discuss and arbitrate these conflicts. Democracy is the regime of lucidity that allows one to arbitrate conflicts that could be violently contentious, or at least to discuss them.
So new institutions would not be enough?
That is the central question of my book. All who have thought about how to reintroduce the long term into the short term have considered the creation of new institutions. Indeed, a certain number are probably necessary, but there must also be other democratic methods. And these methods are found in the social sphere. What has transformed the social world are the collective conventions invented with the help of trade union movements: they have constituted a very concrete, but positive, way of managing and arbitrating social conflict.
What conflicts must these methods bring to light?
Behind my idea of new institutions lies the will to find ways to discuss and make democracy the moment of discussion, the moment of exposing the conflicts that structure society in its relation to the future. In the end, the decisive structuring conflict is that between generations.
For example?
Take the question of debt: debt is the non-arbitration of the present, and non-arbitration of the present means passing the cost of that non-arbitration onto future generations. The same holds for pensions: regardless of the system—pay-as-you-go or funded—the future value will determine the state of pensions, and that value will be dictated by the activity of future generations. In this sense, there is no major technical difference between funded and pay-as-you-go; it is always the future that pays.
It is in this perspective that you advance the idea of an “exercise of democracy.” Where does it come from?
The term “exercise” is somewhat facile. How do ideas come about? They arise when, suddenly, words surface from their context and are repurposed into something else. That is what I did with the notion of a democratic exercise, drawing on the books of Pierre Hadot. I am certainly not a specialist in Marcus Aurelius, but within the idea of exercise there is this absolutely fundamental notion that it is not simply about making decisions, but about adopting a perpetual practice.
Does the democratic exercise also respond to the impotence of discourse about catastrophe? People often say one must be “facing the wall” to act.
It is also, for me, a way to understand the impotence of invoking catastrophes to come: such invocations do not lead to action. We stand before the wall and see that it does not provoke much either; even theories of the wall prove ineffective. This means that one must begin from the premise that the future divides us—but the long term divides us in many ways, and these are different kinds of divisions that must be grasped.
What could these democratic exercises look like in concrete terms?
Democracy is the regime of discussion that seeks to establish something in common from existing conflicts. To illustrate this idea of a democratic exercise, I offer a few examples, notably the practice of “generational conferences.” In high schools, mock parliamentary or international exercises—Model United Nations—are now common.
Thus, I inaugurated one at Henri-IV last year: to introduce it, they wanted someone who could think about democracy, but also a practitioner—and that practitioner was the president of the Senate. He largely justified his institution; he focused on this. And what did he say? To summarize: the Senate is like when you pour a cup of tea that is too hot, and you pour it into another cup—“we, we are the second cup.” That’s a good definition, but I thought we could find something more dynamic and precise.
Have these school initiatives already given rise to an intergenerational project?
A group of high school students, gathered with teachers at the Lycée Lamartine and later joined by other schools, contacted me to organize a “parliament of generations,” that is, a discussion between generations that does not presently exist.
You say your book calls for a collective effort. Where do you see it at work?
A citizen convention on democracy is being launched. I spoke with its organizers, and what is interesting is that, for the first time, there is a citizen convention in which the random selection took into account political opinions. They organized a citizen conference chosen by age, socio-professional category, geographic origin, and also political opinion.
How does it work?
One striking thing is how they work in these conventions: they are about sixty people, split into ten tables of six, each with a moderator whose only role is to give everyone a chance to speak.
At these tables, there were people from both the National Rally and France Insoumise, and so on. By the end of their second day, they unanimously decided to create a common WhatsApp group to keep talking. If these people had already been defined by their political views, dialogue would have been impossible. But the point of organizing this conference is that everyone was first there to share their perplexities—and a community of perplexities can move forward together, whereas a community of opinions already well formed does not advance much.
Ultimately, I think this is the direction in which what I outline in the book is headed: to invent democratic methods. Democracy, beyond voting, is about creating a common space in which differences can be laid bare.