The Neoliberal Republic

The Neoliberal Republic traces the corrosive effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Casting a piercing light on this circulation of influence among corporate lawyers and others in the French power elite, Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France analyze how this dynamic, a feature of all Western democracies, has developed in concert with the rise of neoliberalism over the past three decades.

Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a unique biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, The Neoliberal Republic explores how the always-blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare. The cumulative effect of these developments, the authors reveal, undermines democratic citizenship and the capacity to imagine the public good.

Antoine Vauchez is a CNRS Research Professor at Université Paris 1–Sorbonne and a Permanent Visiting Professor at the iCourts research center at the University of Copenhagen. He is a coauthor of How to Democratize Europe.

Pierre France is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Université Paris 1–Sorbonne.

Vauchez and France's book provides an illuminating portrait of what a neoliberal regime looks like and lifts the hood on it so that the curious reader can see what makes the engine run. Business law, it turns out, is the lubricant that oils the machine.

Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France's The Neoliberal Republic sheds a new and fascinating light on the rise of neoliberalism around the world. Through an unprecedented empirical study of what could be dubbed the "Paris corporate-state bar," Vauchez and France confront a blind spot that permeates both the US sociology of the legal profession and Pierre Bourdieu's field theory: the nexus between the state, businesses, and legal fields.

Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, the book explores how the always-blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare.

R. Daniel Kelemen, Rutgers University, author of Eurolegalism:

The Neoliberal Republic is an outstanding piece of scholarship that raises deep concerns about the normative implications of the emergence of this new opaque sphere—dominated by lawyers—at the intersection of the market and the state.

Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century:

A great book. Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France have a unique talent for combining institutional and sociohistorical approaches in order to study the emergence of a new state-corporate elite in France. A must-read!