Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T21:22:39.200Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The Myth of Democratic Governance

from Part I - Studying the Law of Political Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2020

Poul F. Kjaer
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the democratic promise of “democratic governance” and finds it to be a lie. With a particular emphasis on how the economic system has cut itself adrift from legal regulation and, in the process, re-configured its relationship to the law under the sign of “governance”, we explore the logic of a key substitution: the market principle that was understood as the principle subtending the transactional nature of private law as distinct from public law, gradually becomes the arbiter of the separation itself and guarantor of the circulation (“balancing” in the preferred idiom) of public goods. Governance is imported to lend a vocabulary to these significant shifts, celebrated by its exponents as signifier for plasticity and “experimentalism”. The chapter explores the suggestion that governance might be thought of as an “empty signifier”, in that it performs a function that is typically “hegemonic”: it immunises itself by absorbing and re-defining (across its semantic range) any opposition to it. Through a series of substitutions, it performs a self-referential operation that has internalised all its criteria in order that governance be able to define for itself what is democratic about it.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Law of Political Economy
Transformation in the Function of Law
, pp. 62 - 88
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×