The institution vs the State: self-management and neoliberalism

Language of the seminar: French (but the teacher understands Portuguese).

A number of recent works in the social sciences are interested in self-management practices and the growing demand for democratic horizontality in organizations and social movements. Some of these works question a possible complicity between neoliberal governmentality and self-management experiences. Others, on the contrary, affirm that such experiences were considered by the neoliberal doctrinaires as much more dangerous for their project than the defense of the achievements of the social state.

This seminar will discuss these debates, but will also try to show the original and singular contribution of institutional analysis to these issues, by looking at the way in which movements in the field of health and education, such as anti-psychiatry, institutional psychotherapy, and a whole range of alternative pedagogical experiments since the 1960s, have also contributed to redefining them, in Europe but also elsewhere. In this perspective, it is a continuation of the seminar "Philosophical anthropology, neoliberalism, and politics" that I taught at the FFLCH summer school last year. It will be a matter of questioning a whole set of social and political experiences, which can be defined as self-management and which have, for this reason, participated in the definition of "democratic institutions"; in a radical and non-representative sense.