Governance versus government

Abstract

The displacement of the modern term ofgovernment for the postmodern one ofgovernance, reveals a new postmodern languagein which one is left to guess that both notions,government and governance, tend to be opposed.Corporate governance signifies the seizure ofpower of financial capitalism over industrialcapitalism, which is nothing more than, on theone hand, to lean towards the maximumprofitability for the shareholders, to raise the valueof everything on the market without moralconsiderations, to, force the actors to look forpermanent risk and to adapt more flexiblehierarchical relations in the administration of thecompany; and on the other, the marginalizationof the working class. Governance has reachedthe political matters turning itself into the modelof public management par excellence, it meansthat the government, diminished to it’s basic formguides a civil society, which acquires an importantrole in the creation and follow-up of the differentpolicies, that is to say, that the governmentacquires a flexible form of regulation, it is therewhere political governance leads us, to thealleged self-regulation of private interests thatadded-together are able to shape the generalinterest. Indeed it is a question of a new form ofdomination marked by a political failing, wherethe civil society plays in opposition to the State.

Governance is leaning towards a fearsome trapto the democracy, insofar as it is presented as anextension of democracy embodied in a betterparticipation of civil society, destroying the publicperson formed by the union of all others and thebecoming representative of particular interests.