The book The Neoliberal Republic: Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France offers an original and significant insight into the changing relations between the public and private sectors over the three last decades. While the former aim pursued by the French authors was to study the process of revolving doors from the welfare State to the private sector, the book turns to be an analysis of the blurring effects between the public and the private fields under the rise of neoliberalism. Instead of scrutinizing either the traditional growth of the new public management or the changing profession of lobbyist, consultant, or financial manager, law is analyzed by Pierre France and Antoine Vauchez as vehicle for transformation of the boundaries between the welfare State and private interests through new partnerships, closer cooperation, privatization, and revolving doors. Rather than adopting a unique professional or sectoral approach, the legal analysis applied by the book accurately endorses a smart cross-sectoral perspective (financial markets, telecommunications, banks and insurances, and defense) and scrutinizes the leverages (regulation of competition, tax policies, control over financial operations, and economic authorizations) used by the state. Such a view is clearly of interest when focusing on the moving boundaries between the welfare State and private interests. The authors assume that such a transformation has been both generated by a process of privatization decided by the French right wing (notably under Chirac and Balladur Ministry) and by the EU law on free market and free competition imposed on the EU member states. In this regard and according to the authors, the French State is no longer a welfare State but has become a regulator for the private sector and private companies through notably the inflation of regulatory agencies. In this manner, the French State has turned toward private and neoliberal values such as efficiency, competition, and return on investment.
More specifically, a profession, in particular, is fully investigated in the book to demonstrate such assumptions: the corporate lawyer as former civil servant, who works for private law firms, both intervenes in the State and the private realm (their clients are big private companies). By switching from the welfare State to the private sector through revolving doors, such corporate lawyers have used their competences to the detriment of (and sometimes against) the welfare State. Such a profession, who would attend the same conferences and would meet in the same business clubs (“Le Siècle” for instance) than certain civil servants and regulators, would apply a blurred approach to the public and private realms and would even capture them. The main effect of such closer relations is, beyond a lack of transparency and potential conflict of interests which are often out of public control, a significant decrease in public good and democracy. According to France and Vauchez, who are inspired by Reference WalzerWalzer (1984), general interest and equal enjoyment of freedom and human rights should indeed rely on the closure between the welfare State and private interests. Inspired by Habermas, France and Vauchez propose as solution to enhance democracy and transparency through deliberation and involvement by NGOs, associations, citizens and trade unions. They also propose to cross and fertilize research on such a neoliberal turn and to introduce impact assessment for such blurred policies.
To demonstrate such assumptions, the authors have conducted interviews with dozens of public officials in France and constituted a unique biographical database of 217 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers. They have also analyzed several reports released by the Council of State (the highest administrative Court in France), the Audit Court and several regulatory agencies. They have lastly used secondary sources to demonstrate their hypothesis.
The sociolegal lens applied by the book is clearly both inspired by Bourdieu on the elite and the welfare State (Reference BourdieuBourdieu, 1989), by Crouch on neoliberalism (Reference CrouchCrouch, 2011, Reference Crouch2014) and by Dezalay's approach to merchants of law (belonging to the elite) who act at the international level and contribute to the development of economic globalization and transnational justice (Reference DezalayDezalay, 1992). The main difference from these authors is that the book exclusively focuses on the French level.
While the EU law and neoliberalism are considered to be the driven forces, the influence played by globalization through international public institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank is quite ignored by the authors. The process of globalization, which affects the elite, could also explain why such traditional boundaries are moving so much since the 1990s.
Some sectors, which are evoked in the introduction, are also neglected by the authors such as the environment and the healthcare and justice sectors (for justice, see Reference CliquennoisCliquennois, 2020). Does such an analysis also apply for such sectors? The same critic applies for the role played by the profession of banker and consultant which are quite ignored by the authors while banker was the former profession of several French presidents including Pompidou and Macron. Moreover, some corporate lawyers work for banks and in the financial realm. Such professions seem to be sufficiently significant to be not disregarded. More generally, it would have been relevant to analyze all the process of revolving doors, not only the move from the State to the private sector but also from the private realm to the public. The analysis of the reversal trend would have certainly reinforced the demonstration which is nevertheless convincing as it stands.
