Abstract

DUFOUR, Dany-Robert. Governance Versus Government. cuad.adm. [online]. 2009, n.41, pp.27-37. ISSN 0120-4645.

The displacement of the modern term of government for the postmodern one of governance, reveals a new postmodern language in which one is left to guess that both notions, government and governance, tend to be opposed. Corporate governance signifies the seizure of power of financial capitalism over industrial capitalism, which is nothing more than, on the one hand, to lean towards the maximum profitability for the shareholders, to raise the value of everything on the market without moral considerations, to, force the actors to look for permanent risk and to adapt more flexible hierarchical relations in the administration of the company; and on the other, the marginalization of the working class. Governance has reached the political matters turning itself into the model of public management par excellence, it means that the government, diminished to it’s basic form guides a civil society, which acquires an important role in the creation and follow-up of the different policies, that is to say, that the government acquires a flexible form of regulation, it is there where political governance leads us, to the alleged self-regulation of private interests that added-together are able to shape the general interest. Indeed it is a question of a new form of domination marked by a political failing, where the civil society plays in opposition to the State. Governance is leaning towards a fearsome trap to the democracy, insofar as it is presented as an extension of democracy embodied in a better participation of civil society, destroying the public person formed by the union of all others and the becoming representative of particular interests.

Keywords : Government; governance; corporate governance; political governance; civil society.

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