27.01.2025
“A state that interferes in everything not only weakens institutions; it also destroys the bonds of trust between citizens, by positioning itself between them and making them strangers to one another.”
(The Crisis of Culture) – Hannah Arendt
Social-democratic thinking as it currently stands in France has run its course. It accomplished much over many decades, but its intellectual model has scarcely evolved in the face of at least four major trends that have emerged over time. These shifts were either ignored, insufficiently addressed, outright denied, or blindly followed without a grasp of their consequences. Citing them without regard to priority: public authority, security, and the migration phenomenon — particularly with the rise of Islamist ideology — making the question of national identity more acute. The rise of a fierce individualism that overemphasizes rights while devaluing obligations. An obsession with equality that tips into dangerous egalitarianism, undermining the pursuit of equal opportunity and justice. Finally, the hypertrophy of the public sphere, whose entropy breeds inefficiency, discouragement, loss of trust, and rising anxiety.
We will return to each of these issues. Although not cited here, the climate transition remains crucial; social democracy has, with too many dogmas and insufficient scientific rigor, managed to partially internalize it. To avoid obsolescence, social-democratic thought must therefore explore new terrain — long neglected, even within itself. Let us lay a few modest foundations.
Market and State
Markets are indispensable: they drive economic dynamism, resource allocation, and (albeit imperfect) supply-demand equilibrium. However, they cannot, in and of themselves, be sufficient regulators. For markets to function effectively and sustainably, they require law, institutional norms, regulatory bodies, and intermediary institutions — all of which become essential when the market becomes volatile.
The public sphere is thus vital for guiding and regulating economic and social activity. The State — in a broad sense — plays a critical role in maintaining this balance, including supporting those intermediary bodies such as trade unions. This system enables society’s various forces to be channeled toward an often-precarious but essential harmony. This model of governance, though imperfect and far from linear, has led to increases in overall well-being, fairly distributed across much of Europe.
Its most advanced manifestations have appeared in Northern Europe and Germany. With variations, a form of social democracy has spread throughout Europe, becoming—willingly or not—a defining characteristic. Social democracy, in its broadest sense, beyond left-right government oscillations, remains the baseline regulatory framework across Europe — the backbone of its political economies.
Yet Europe today faces relative decline, and in recent years, significant economic lag — particularly compared to the American model. Possible culprits? Excessive regulations and norms, reduced incentives for initiative and risk-taking, and a pursuit of absolute equality over fairness. Even the more reformist strains of social democracy remain inadequate in navigating this trajectory.
Authority, Security, Immigration
Public policy under social democracy must now account for authority, security, and better regulatory control of immigration. Failing to integrate these themes into a republican perspective leaves the discourse to populists, who then draw in citizens rightly frustrated by their day-to-day realities being ignored.
These topics are not superficial and cannot be dismissed moralistically or condescendingly. Likewise, thinking of a nation purely as a multicultural kaleidoscope without unity, clear borders, shared culture, or true identity — founded only on abstract universal values — is naive. It denies history, geography, and the Nation itself and overlooks the cultural bonds that allow individuals to recognize and live meaningfully together. Ignoring this truth eventually leads to disaster, as Ernest Renan warned:
“What unites us is not language, religion, or race, but a shared past and a common will to live together. A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle, shaped by past glories and a current desire to continue a shared life. A nation is a daily plebiscite.”
While fundamental, these issues will not be expanded upon further in this article.
Efficiency Loss in the Public Sphere
Just as markets can fail or cause harm, public institutions too can be ineffective — or even counterproductive. Neither markets nor governments are omniscient. Public policy must be approached free of ideology: policies can be ineffective, inappropriate, or even harmful, generating the opposite outcomes they seek. Recognizing this must be central to any renewal of social-democratic thinking.
We must move past simplistic binaries of the “evil capital” versus the “benevolent State.” That dichotomy is not only naïve but misleading. Both capital and the State possess their own internal logics: one driven by return on investment, accumulation, and growth; the other by control and influence. Both must be kept in balance — neither overpowering the other — in order to foster a progressive, stable society.
The Logic of State Expansion: Overadministration
France has developed, over the decades, an omnipresent State that intermediates all social relations — inserting itself between citizens and society, exercising tighter control over individuals, and producing ever more complex, intrusive regulations. This entropic proliferation has diminishing returns.
This is a particularly French issue (more so than in the U.S. or even elsewhere in Europe). Such overgovernance causes a feeling of helplessness, discouragement, and nostalgia — even selfishness or rebellion. Bureaucracy infantilizes the citizenry, encouraging greater dependence on the State, which inevitably leads to disappointment and fear — even of minor challenges — as individual
responsibility is diminished.
Arendt again:
“Action is what allows men to appear before others, to reveal themselves in their uniqueness, and to build a common world. When the state monopolizes this capacity, citizens become mere spectators.”
— The Human Condition
Too much state presence leads to individual atomization and alienation, undermines self-confidence, erodes mutual trust, stifles communal action, and weakens self-organized solidarity. The balance between individual liberty/responsibility and societal order breaks down. As Arendt also warned:
“The danger is not just the violence of authoritarian regimes, but the gradual drift toward a soft and paternalistic administration that suffocates freedom under the pretense of protection.”
Combining Ethics and Effectiveness
To renew public trust and efficiency, the State must reclaim vision and vitality — not through blind expansion, but smart limitation. Laws, institutions, and policies should be strictly necessary for society and economic life. The public sector must aim for the best synthesis between ethics and efficacy — neither of which is the sole domain of either State or market.
These two values are interlinked, feeding one another. There is no sustainable ethics without effectiveness, nor enduring effectiveness without ethics. Social democrats must own this dialectic — not deny it.
Hyperdemocracy and Hypersocial-Democracy
Democracy and social democracy are susceptible to their own excesses. What might be called “hyperdemocracy” or “hypersocial-democracy” — their unchecked dynamic growth — risks weakening their foundations or even causing their undoing.
Tocqueville warned of this. Without deep introspection, democracy and social democracy may collapse under their own weight, ushering in forms of populism — from the left or right.
Endless expansion of individual rights, with no equivalent sense of duty, leads to exaggerated individualism and radical segmentation — identity politics, grievance culture. The framing of all human exchanges as oppressor vs. oppressed dissolves shared narratives. Everyone is assigned guilt or victimhood. This simplifies and falsifies history, which is refashioned to support this binary framing.
All this is masked behind totemic buzzwords — endlessly repeated yet hollow — enforced by a moral and ideological police. Wokism is the most complete expression of this democratic distortion. It is not progressivism nor democracy extended — but their parody, and potentially their undoing.
Criticizing it does not make one conservative or reactionary. Social democracy must not leave this fight to populists alone — or risk vanishing into irrelevance, as evidenced in both the United States and France.
Social Democracy’s Own Excesses
That said, social democracy has its internal structural flaws too — especially its pursuit of absolute equality. Magical thinking, lacking nuance. Total equality leads to jealousy, resentment, suppression of merit — and therefore, stagnation.
Tocqueville:
“There is no passion more fatal to man and society than this love of equality, which can degrade individuals and push them to prefer shared mediocrity over individual excellence.”
We must clarify the differences between absolute equality, equality of rights, equality of opportunity, and equity — along with their ethical, social, and economic effects.
Hyperdemocracy and hypersocial-democracy thus produce societal regression, economic decay, moral confusion, and ultimately collapse. They foster jealousy, resentment, and hatred. And they’re already at play.
A Pseudo-Progressivism That Hides Real Regression
Naïve goodwill or willful blindness about these dynamics masquerades as progressivism — when it is in fact dangerous regression. It isolates individuals, perverts values like universalism and humanism, and damages the foundations of real progress: emancipation, responsibility, and social harmony.
Too much state, too much democracy, too much social democracy — all unleash unchecked demands for rights, diminish any sense of duty, and breed inefficiency. Result? Generalized mistrust — of institutions, politics, others, and society itself.
This leads eventually to insurmountable public debt.
The Survival of the Social Market Economy
For a social market economy to survive, protection for the vulnerable — through the public sphere — must be paired with personal, family, and community responsibility. The welfare state — yes, but not infinite protection from everything. That breeds passivity.
Tocqueville again warns:
“The sovereign stretches its arms over all society; it covers the surface with a network of petty rules, minute and uniform, through which even the most original minds and energetic souls cannot make their way. It does not break wills, but softens, bends, and guides them; it hinders, represses, enervates, extinguishes, and stultifies people until each nation becomes a flock of timid and industrious animals with the government as their shepherd.”
Conclusion: The Stakes
The equilibrium between ethics and efficiency is broken. Without adjustment, the welfare state and the social safety net are both endangered. France’s administrative excesses threaten the very reproducibility — that is, survivability — of this governance model.
If we don’t act, we face cultural, financial, and moral collapse.
The great question, then, is this:
How can we build mechanisms that limit these excesses? How do we rediscover the vital balances upon which our societies thrive?
This is, at its core, a matter of survival — for our model, for Europe, and for France.
Social democracy has long defined the European political model, balancing markets and state authority in the pursuit of fairness and prosperity. Yet in France, this intellectual tradition has stalled — dissolving into excessive statism, inefficiency, and the distortions of hyper-democracy and identity politics. This essay argues for a profound renewal of social‑democratic thought: one that reasserts authority and responsibility alongside rights, reconciles ethics with effectiveness, and rebuilds trust among citizens. Without such a reset, the European model risks decline — culturally, economically, and politically.
