Opinion Sur
A serious crisis, an international conflict, acute social disorganization, or a loss in the unified control over the power apparatus can open up the doors to a general insurrection.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term Ancien Regime (French: “old order”) refers to the political and social system of France prior to the French Revolution. Its essence lay in the interweaving of the state’s social, political, and economic forms; the term itself, though primarily a political concept, has also always had a clear social and economic resonance.
At first blush, nothing could be more distant and different from present-day globalization than 18th century French society. The mode of production, the class structure, and the political regime are as far from today as a distant planet is far from Earth. And yet, the ancien regime and 21st century globalization share an alarming similarity on a higher level of abstraction, that is, at the level of the structure and dynamics of systems. In both cases, the very functioning of the economy and society produce extreme inequality. In its turn, such inequality, which is not mitigated or reversed, becomes very visible and very difficult to justify. In short, in the eyes of vast swaths of the population, it becomes a regime of privileges with diminishing legitimacy.
In old France, critics launched a philosophically reasoned attack on the system, best exemplified by the Abbe Sieyes, especially his Essay on the Privileges[1]. He summarized his arguments in a famous pamphlet which in many ways triggered the French Revolution, What is the Third Estate? Today we would call his Third Estate our civil society, in particular productive workers and the productive middle class. Inequality has increased so much in our own era that the Third Estate is the equivalent of what the protestors in “Occupy Wall Street” called the 99%. Sieyes would be comfortable with their critique. His remarks of 1789 merit repetition in 2017:
“… Has nobody observed that as soon as the government becomes the property of a separate class, it starts to grow out of all proportion and that posts are created not to meet the needs of the governed but of those who govern them? …
It suffices to have made the point that the so-called usefulness of a privileged order to the public service is a fallacy; that, without help from this order, all the arduous tasks in the service are performed by the Third Estate; that without this order the higher posts could be infinitely better filled; that they ought to be the natural prize and reward of recognized ability and service; and that if the privileged have succeeded in usurping all well-paid and honorific posts, this is both a hateful iniquity towards the generality of citizens and in act of treason to the commonwealth.
Who is bold enough to maintain that the Third Estate does not contain within itself everything needful to constitute a complete nation? It is like a strong and robust man with one arm still in chains. If the privileged order were removed, the nation would not be something less but something more. What then is the Third Estate? All; but an “all” that is fettered and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? It would be all; but free and flourishing. Nothing will go well without the Third Estate; everything would go considerably better without the others….”
In our more technical era, critics offer a reasoned economic argument against the regime of mounting inequality, exemplified by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality. In contemporary sociology, possibly the best analysis was offered by Charles Tilly, in his book Durable Inequality. Tilly was also an expert on pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France, which provided an empirical jumping board for his theoretical disquisition. Piketty, Stiglitz, and Tilly argue that beyond a certain point, inequality tends to become hereditary as well.
To the equation Increased inequality=illegitimate privilege I would add another structural characteristic of ancien regimes. It is the inability of the elites to correct or steer the dysfunctions. Today we see that at both the international and the national levels elites cannot govern the commons. Even worse, the very attempts to reform the system make its crisis more pronounced. Under such strains, a serious disorganization, conflict, or loss of control at the top can open the sluice gates of a general insurrection, with different ideological tones, mixing futuristic utopias with reactionary attempts to return to the past. The present anti-global movements and the resurgence of national populisms are a case in point. Welcome to the world in 2017.
[1] An essay on privileges, and particularly on hereditary nobility. by the count Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Published in 1789 and printed in English in 1791 for J. Ridgway in London.
