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1 results

  • 2 - Reconsidering the Good of Improving Accountability

  • from Part I - (Re)theorising Accountability in EMU
  • Edited by Mark Dawson, Hertie School, Berlin
  • Book:
    Substantive Accountability in Europe's New Economic Governance
    Published online:
    23 November 2023
    Print publication:
    07 December 2023, pp 45-62
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  • Summary

    Among the rhetorical pleas that follow most instances of public dissatisfaction is the call for more or better accountability. Accountability is a lauded notion, a “golden concept” that is considered widely as critical to the success of democratic government. Such pleas, I will argue, are misplaced. Rather than starting from the premise of accountability as an idea that no one can be against, I consider the possibility that accountability undermines the very notion it ostensibly promotes: self-government. The concept of accountability in modern political theory is tied more closely to the emergence of an impersonal administrative state than it is to the hopeful horizon of a democratic one. In practice and in theory, it is a concept of irresponsibility, a technological approach to government that provides the comforts of impersonal rationality.