Governance: Between myth and reality

Abstract

Governance is today presented as a new paradigm of social regulation that has come to supplant the previously established paradigm based on social conflict and on the privileged role of the sovereign state to regulate this conflict through the power of control and coercion at its disposal. In this article, the author presents a radical critique of the new paradigm, conceiving it as the regulatory matrix of neoliberalism, seen as a new version of laissez faire capitalism. Centered on the question of governability, this regulatory matrix presupposes a politics of law and a politics of rights that tend to aggravate the crisis of legitimacy of the state.