Le libéralisme social demeure-t-il une alternative ?

Current neo-liberalism is a resurgence of the utopia of the self-regulating market. Its destructive effects, today as yesterday, are at the origin of going back to politics oscillating between nationalism and authoritarianism, on the one hand, social liberalism on the other. This challenge, identified by Polanyi in his time, recalls us that no society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent. According to the neo-liberals, for whom the desirable goal remains a globalized market economy that would be rid of any power, paradoxically it is up to the political power to implement the reforms necessary for individuals to adapt as quickly as possible to this deal. This search for flexibility and adaptability contrasts with a social liberalism according to which the viability of the changes inherent in capitalism depends on the existence of stabilization mechanisms making adaptations slow and progressive: a liberalism that excludes neither power nor constraint. The thesis that we intend to defend is that liberalism can only survive in its form of social liberalism whose distinctive feature is certainly to make room for macroeconomic regulation, but also, and more generally, to ensure that forms of cooperation or social interaction that reconcile efficiency and equity, stability or inertia and evolution prevail.