29.11.2025
Below is an in-depth essay on the necessary renewal of the politico-economic-social model that defines the system in which we live in Europe, regardless of right–left alternations in power. This renewal is all the more essential in France, where this tradition of thought has gradually been diluted into an overdeveloped statism and the byways of wokisme.
“A state that interferes everywhere not only weakens institutions; it also destroys the relations of trust between citizens, for it stands between them and makes them strangers to one another.”
(The Crisis of Culture) — Hannah Arendt
A Model Out of Breath
The model as it exists today in France has run its course. It has contributed a great deal over the decades. But its intellectual foundations have evolved very little—in fact, they have drifted—while at least four major developments have taken place. These developments have been ignored, left unexamined, sometimes denied, or worse still, embraced without understanding their consequences. Let us list them without ranking.
The issue of public authority, security, and migration, along with the rise of Islamist ideology—reshaping the question of what makes a nation. The rise of fierce individualism, marked by the overvaluation of individual rights and the devaluation of duties. The obsession with equality, leading to a dangerous egalitarianism at the expense of equal opportunity and fairness. And finally, the expansion of an oversized public sector whose entropic growth breeds inefficiency, discouragement, loss of trust and rising anxiety.
We will return to each of these points. The essential challenge of the ecological transition is not mentioned here, for our model—with too many dogmas and an insufficiently scientific approach—has nonetheless integrated it relatively well into its framework. We must therefore renew our thinking, or risk becoming obsolete, by exploring areas that have so far been insufficiently examined. Let us try, modestly, to lay a few building blocks.
Market and State
The market is indispensable, for it generates economic dynamism, allocates resources, and matches supply and demand—imperfectly, of course, but irreplaceably. Yet the market cannot be a sufficient regulatory mechanism on its own, for to remain effective and sufficiently stable it needs law, rules, institutions, regulatory bodies, and intermediary groups capable of acting when the market becomes destabilizing. The public sphere is therefore essential to regulating the market, the economy, and society at large.
Thus the State—in the broad sense—is necessary for maintaining society’s balance, including by fostering intermediary bodies such as trade unions, which help regulate the whole. The various forces at play in society can then be channelled more or less harmoniously in a shifting, inherently unstable balance. And this regulatory model has enabled—unevenly and not linearly—a rise in well-being, relatively well shared across European countries.
The most developed manifestations of this regulatory model, combining ethics and efficiency, have been found in Northern Europe and Germany. Later, with nuances, a form of social democracy spread across Europe and became, volens nolens, one of its defining features. Overall, our model, with its variants, has for decades achieved a successful combination of markets with institutions and rules—including redistributive ones.
We use the term social market economy in a broad sense, beyond the alternation of right- and left-wing governments, to designate the common foundation that best captures the regulatory mode of European countries.
However, Europe now appears to be experiencing a relative decline—and in recent years even a significant economic lag behind the American model. The proliferation of norms and regulations, the weaker incentives for initiative and risk-taking, and the unchecked drive for equality—not fairness—seem to be part of the explanation. This model, even in its reformist versions aware of this dangerous trajectory, has become insufficient.
Authority, Security, Immigration
It is essential to integrate into public-policy thinking the issues of public authority, security, and better regulation and integration of immigration. Failing to address these matters in a republican manner leaves them to populist movements, which can then attract voters who are rightly dissatisfied at not being heard on sensitive issues of daily life.
These subjects are crucial, and they must not be treated moralistically or with disdain. Likewise, conceiving a country, a nation, as a multicultural kaleidoscope with no unity, no real borders, no shared culture, no genuine identity, and with nothing in common but disembodied universal values is an ethereal vision that dissolves history, geography and the very notion of nationhood. It ignores the cultural bonds that forge a country, enabling its inhabitants to recognize themselves within it and live together. Denying this truth leads sooner or later—volens nolens—to disaster.
Renan had already said it all: “What unites us is not a language, a religion or a race, but a shared past and a shared willingness to live together. A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle, built on the memory of past glories and the present consent to continue that common life. A nation is a daily plebiscite.” Let this be an inspiration.
These fundamental issues, however, will not be further developed in this paper.
Over-administration: a Brake on Action
We must also examine carefully the loss of effectiveness in the public sphere. Just as markets are not free of errors and endogenous dysfunctions, public decisions may be ineffective, or simply wrong. Neither markets nor the State are omniscient. We must acknowledge—beyond ideology—that public policy may fail, be unsuitable, or even undesirable. It may even generate perverse effects contrary to its goals.
This must become core to the renewal of social-market-economy thinking. It is worth remembering that there is no “evil capital” and “virtuous State.” No camp of good and camp of evil. This simplistic and dangerous Manichaeism is misleading. Capital and its institutional counterpart each follow their own logic of endless expansion—there, in terms of return, accumulation; here, in terms of control and power. Both feel, like living organisms, the vital need to grow. Yet both are necessary and complementary—so long as neither is allowed to dominate and destabilize the delicate balance required for progress.
The State’s Logic of Growth: Over-administration
We must think freely about the decades-long expansion in France of an omnipresent State that increasingly intermediates relations among individuals—that is, between individuals and society. This State exercises ever-tighter control over citizens and, in an entropic dynamic, develops an ever-heavier over-administration with diminishing returns.
This analysis is especially necessary in Europe—and more particularly in France—much more than in the United States. Over-administration breeds discouragement, nostalgia, and a sense of powerlessness. It also drives individuals to seek maximal advantage for themselves, or even, for some, to desire sedition or insubordination. Through its intrinsic logic of endless growth, over-administration infantilizes people and continually pushes them to demand ever more from the State. This inevitably leads to disappointment, which in turn fuels fear—even in the face of small problems—because the sense of personal responsibility has been eroded.
Too much State intervention atomizes individuals² and alienates them from their own capacity to act. An overintrusive State can undermine self-confidence and mutual trust. It hampers individual and collective action and weakens self-organized solidarity within society.
“Action is what enables human beings to appear before one another, to reveal themselves in their singularity, and to build a common world. When the State monopolizes this capacity, citizens are reduced to mere spectators.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
In short, following Arendt’s insight, this dynamic erodes the necessary balance between individual and collective freedom and responsibility on the one hand, and necessary social regulation on the other. “The danger is not only in the violence of authoritarian regimes but also in the gradual slide into a soft, paternalistic administration that suffocates freedom under the pretext of protection.”
The Essential Combination of Ethics and Efficiency
Since the public sphere can err and tends to expand until its effectiveness collapses, the State must regain clarity of vision and vigour. It must avoid developing superfluous structures and refrain from generating unnecessary laws, rules and institutions. The public sphere must ensure the best possible balance between ethics and efficiency; neither belongs exclusively to the market or to the State. Their interplay is complex and interwoven. Ethics and efficiency belong together in companies and in society as a whole; neither can endure without the other.
Hyper-democracy
We must also question democracy’s natural trajectory—its endogenous dynamic—what I call hyper-democracy. Democracy can generate its own excesses. Tocqueville already warned of this. Without deep reflection on these tendencies, democracy can weaken itself and ultimately even disappear, paving the way for populism—whether far right or far left.
We cannot avoid reflecting on democracy’s own specific excesses: the endless expansion of individual rights, enforceable against everyone else, combined with the erosion of duties. This leads to extreme individualism, egoism, and fragmentary communautarisme. These are symptoms of total self-absorption. And ideologically, they are reinforced by the simplistic idea that everyone is necessarily either an oppressor or oppressed, with thought policed by new dogmas.
This produces hatred of the Other—those assigned as oppressors, burdened with indelible guilt. The oppressed, in turn, are deemed to be freed forever from duty or responsibility. Redemption for the “oppressor” is only possible through total re-education and self-denunciation. A fantasy reminiscent of totalitarianism.
All this hides behind totemic words, repeated endlessly—hollow words but mandatory, belonging to the “good” camp. Other words become shameful, forbidden. A police of morals, a police of thought. Wokisme is the caricature and most advanced expression of this distortion of democracy. It is not an extension of democracy, nor of progressivism. It is a new ideology of democratic excess, ultimately destructive of democracy itself.
Opposing wokisme—understood as the intolerant, totalitarian radicalization of progressive activism—is neither conservatism nor reaction. The defenders of the democratic, liberal, social-market model cannot leave the critique of wokisme to populists alone, at the risk of disappearing themselves. The American example is clear; so is that of today’s French Socialist Party, absorbed by NFP/LFI as the RN grows in parallel.
Other endogenous excesses also emerge from hyper-democracy: the quest for absolute equality, magical thinking that suffocates the very dynamism of society. As Tocqueville wrote: “There is no passion so fatal to man and society as the love of equality, which can debase individuals and lead them to prefer a common mediocrity over individual excellence.”
Without self-reflection and regulation, our model drifts fatally. We must reassess absolute equality, equality of rights, equality of opportunity, and fairness, along with their moral, economic and social implications.
Hyper-democracy leads to regression, the erosion of economic dynamism and well-being, financial collapse, and moral decay. It unleashes the lowest passions—jealousy, resentment, hatred—which are already at work.
Without renewed thinking about democracy’s endogenous excesses, about over-administration and its effects, about the legitimate republican need to restore public authority, and about better immigration regulation and integration, mistrust toward democracy will not diminish. The rise of populism does not originate solely in these factors, but it would be dangerous to deny that they are part of the cause.
A False “Progressivism” Concealing a True Regression
Benevolence—or blindness—toward the causes and consequences of these four trends does not constitute progressivism, despite its self-presentation. Quite the opposite. These phenomena confine, isolate, and provoke fatal regressions in relation to humanist and universalist values—always values of progress, responsibility, emancipation and harmony. Imperfectly realized, yes, but they have enabled societies to recognize and respect minorities without doing so at the expense of the majority. They have supported racial, gender and social equality, and facilitated equality of opportunity.
The combination of too much State with hyper-democracy creates a pernicious, destructive dynamic resolved only through limitless expansion of rights and the collapse of duties and responsibilities, as well as through declining effectiveness of socio-economic regulation. This generates societal mistrust toward institutions, politics, and others—in short, toward society itself. And ultimately, it drives unsustainable public debt.
A society with a social market economy must ensure essential protection for the most vulnerable while balancing this with individual and collective responsibility. The welfare state is essential, but it cannot and must not attempt to protect from everything, without limit, at the cost of widespread disempowerment.
Tocqueville again: “The sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, minute, uniform rules… it does not break wills, but it softens and bends them… until each nation is reduced to nothing more than a flock of timid, industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
The Survival of the Social Market Economy Model
The proper balance—the viable equilibrium—has been broken. This endangers the welfare state itself, and thus the precious social protection it provides.
The present analysis questions whether democracy, social democracy, and the public sphere can avoid entropic decline and stabilize at an equilibrium combining justice (ethics), efficiency (wealth creation), and economic and social well-being.
This is a matter of survival for our European socio-economic model. With specifically French shortcomings making the system increasingly inefficient, our regulatory model will sooner or later become incapable of reproducing itself—incapable of surviving. If renewal does not come in time, the consequences will be widespread impoverishment and a moral and financial collapse.
The reflection must therefore continue. How can we design mechanisms that limit these excesses? How can we restore the vital equilibria that allow our societies to survive and regain vitality?
That is the challenge. It is a fundamental question for our future, our “model,” our Europe, and our country.
Olivier Klein
Professor of economics at HEC Paris
