From Double Agents to Bouncers: Corporate Lawyers and the Making of the Public-Private State

• Published in: Law & social inquiry Vol. 46; no. 4; pp. 1281 - 1286
• Main Author: Dezalay, Sara
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.11.2021
• Subjects: 19th century; Attorneys; Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002); Capitalism; Case studies; Democracy; Legal professions; Neoliberalism; Political factors; Politics; Power structure; Public good; Public sector private sector relations; Public sphere; Security personnel; Social space; Sociology; State power; Transnationalism; France; United States > US
• ISSN: 0897-6546; 1747-4469; 1545-696X
• DOI: 10.1017/lsi.2021.47

Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France’s (2020) The Neoliberal Republic sheds a new and fascinating light on the rise of neoliberalism around the world. Focused on France—the epitome of the “strong state”—their study traces the invention of a “public-private state” in the past thirty years. Vauchez and France’s core thesis is that the blurring between the public sphere and private interests fostered by neoliberalism is produced by, as much as it produces, an “interstitial space”—a social space sitting astride the public and the private. Far from a return of the République des avocats of the late nineteenth century—when the legal profession and law universities were the main breeding grounds for the emerging Republican elite—they document the expansion of a corporate bar that displays an interest in producing the state. Their study has a normative import—namely, that it is fostering a “black hole” in the power structure that is corrosive for French democracy, as this public-private space is positioned in the blind spot of public oversight. In the global political context of denunciation of state capture by private interests, this political argument is made particularly strong thanks to the theoretical claims that underpin it. 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 (2012) field theory: the nexus between the state, businesses, and legal fields. In what follows, I unpack their core arguments, before examining the limits of this case study qua a case study: where can these transformations within the French field of state power be situated globally? I argue that confronting this question requires an interconnected sociopolitical and historical approach to reposition the French trajectory within its imperial pasts and their contemporary revivals in the current phase of capitalism.