A New Grammar of the General Interest

Since 2017 is a year of important elections in various Western countries, Futuribles has decided to look into the lack of vision in political life, so regularly condemned by commentators, by publishing a series of articles on the subject. Is there a real deficit here? If so, what are the reasons for it, and how might it be remedied? After two initial articles published in the March-April 2017 issue, we pursue the theme with this analysis by Yannick Blanc, which shows the extent to which the institutional system, as it has developed in France, is outdated and ill-adapted to the way society operates. What the author terms the “tutelary matrix”, in which politics was made — and institutions made to operate — from the top down (by prescribing rules in phase with society’s values to regulate its usages), is at odds today with citizens’ growing propensity to organize themselves into action groups along very different lines, in which user requirements are to the fore. Should the state fall in with this “bottom-up” logic to orchestrate its strategic vision and the means of implementing it? However one views that question, it is the establishment of a new grammar of the general interest around this rules/values/forms-of-use triptych that Yannick Blanc is calling for here.