Tocqueville's Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France

Abstract

This text offers an interpretation of the transformation of French economic policymaking and state-society relations during the last quarter of the 20th century. In so doing, it challenges widely held views about the preconditions for state leadership and for a vibrant civil society. France has long been characterized as a statist political economy, with state strength predicted on autonomy from a weak and divided civil society. Jonah Levy shows that this disdain for societal and local institutions has come back to haunt French officials - what he terms Tocqueville's revenge. The absence of societal partners undermined the operation of statist policymaking in the 1970s and early 1980s, and has made it difficult to forge alternative forms of economic coordination in the post-statist period.

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