If the left-wing wanted to give back to Nicolas Sarkozy all his chances for 2012, it could not make a better choice than reduce its ‘projet de société’, as proposed by Martine Aubry, by the concept of “care” that the first secretary of the Socialist Party explained as a “society of care” gathering «chains of care, family and friend solidarity , neighborhood attention, the commitment of the entire society». This concept falls under the tradition of the English empathic philosophy, which goes back to David Hume and Adam Smith and reappears in the United States under Reagan in 1982, with a book by Carol Gilligan “morality of women”, making of care the ideology of feminism, before becoming with another book by Joan Trento, in 1993, a general form of society.
Thus defined, this concept finds a priori a resonance in the current crisis: it refers to the need to respond to the feeling of loneliness, neglect, suffered by those who are in a precarious situation in a society that promotes winners. It could therefore address a lack of empathy and gentleness. It also has the ability to slip at the same time in the steps of the union’s demand of a generalized social security against job insecurity, to the care request about the emotion expressed around charity work, and incidentally, to walk on the field of social Catholicism, embodied both by the center and the second left-wing.
But France in 2010 bears no resemblance to the United States in 1980 and this concept is in fact incomplete and dangerous.
It is incomplete because it includes only very partially the English concept, which includes the basic concept of “having interest in, taking seriously, attaching importance to” and refers to dignity, the shared exercise of power, not the paternalism of care.
It is dangerous because it transforms people into patients and the State into a kind of social general hospital. As the left-wing does already by referring to the need for a “professional social security” assimilating unemployment to a disease, the State should treat. It is dangerous because it forgets that the weakest, those that we must especially take care of, are those that, today, have no right to vote.
In fact, today, like tomorrow, French people are not, essentially, patients to treat, but citizens to be taken into account.
They do not need to be heard to complain, to heal, but want to be listened to, wanting to act for themselves, for others, for the generations to come, for the country.
The French people do not need care, they ask for respect.
And respect begins with a discourse of truth: the state is ruined by two decades of laxity. Public money is horribly and badly spent, for the benefit of those who need it least. The country is no longer working enough and is rushing towards decline.
The nation is therefore in need of a just authority, attentive to the weakest, concerned about the future, deciding democratically of priorities that are transparent.
Nothing could be worse than to return to the values of the 19th century in order to succeed in the 21st century.