Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Governance by Numbers: The Making of a Legal Model of Allegiance by Professor Alain Supiot
The Wests cherished dream of social harmony by numbers is today disrupting all our familiar legal frameworks - the state democracy and law itself. Its scientific vision shaped both Taylorism and Soviet Planning and today with globalisation it is flourishing in the form of governance by numbers. Shunning the goal of governing by just laws and empowered by the information and communication technologies governance champions a new normative ideal of attaining measurable objectives. Programmes supplant legislation and governance displaces government. However management by objectives revives forms of law typical of economic vassalage. When a person is no longer protected by a law applying equally to all the only solution is to pledge allegiance to someone stronger than oneself. Rule by law had already secured the principle of impersonal power but in taking this principle to extremes governance by numbers has paradoxically spawned a world ruled by ties of allegiance.