The French Campaign for Improved Road Safety: State Power, Public Policy, and Regimes of Justification

Abstract

In reaction against Bourdieu's state-centered analysis of power, theorists associated with the ‘Groupe de sociologie morale’ argue that non-state actors exercise considerable agency. In so doing, these actors draw upon ‘regimes of justification’ to formulate and defend moral schemes of action. While a necessary corrective to a Bourdieusian view of the world in which habitus and institutional fields of power leave relatively little room for creative agency, this position nonetheless leaves unanswered questions pertaining to the role of the state and its relation to these regimes of justification. The recent French campaign for road safety provides an opportune instance in which to observe how states can and do draw on regimes of justification to legitimate public policies. Here I argue that the French government used two regimes, namely those based on civic equality and solidarity and on industrial efficiency, to legitimate new measures that cut across longstanding cultural patterns. In this process, the supposedly dirigiste French state actively sought civil society partners to educate French drivers and to convince them to accept, however grudgingly, the new policies. This case example thus suggests a middle path between the Bourdieusian view of the state as the ultimate field of power and the emphasis on individual agency of the approach associated with the ‘Groupe de sociologie morale’.