“Une Société Désirable” – or how to care for the world

Dominique Meda is one of France's leading public intellectuals but not of the sort whose utility is measured in talk-show appearances or sound-bites outside of one's area of expertise. More in the mold of the late Tony Judt, or Enzo Traverso or Gerard Noiriel (who have all written soberly about how and how not to fulfill that role), Meda, philosopher, sociologist and upper-echelon public servant, carries out innovative research on national wealth indicators, as well as on work and workers, on male-female work-place imbalance, on social policy and how best to structure the (inevitable) transition to a sustainable society (the subject of her latest book). Her occasional columns in Le Monde are a model of the genre. Her engagement with society includes founding the Laboratory for Professional Male-Female Equality and directing the Veblen Institute for socio-economic reform and transition, and serving the state as General Inspector for Social Affairs.

In Une Société Désirable, subtitled “How to care for the world”, Dominique Meda draws on previous work combined with her current focus on a sustainable transition to lay out a short but remarkably complete blueprint for a transition based on value-creating work by women and men, work which enhances rather than drains the lives of workers. Looking at the growing taste of voters for authoritarian leaders, Meda finds that explainers like racism or social-media foment are incomplete; there is also genuine anger over work-related malaise wrought by neo-liberalism's unbridled competition. She cites Karl Polanyi's warning at the end of WWII that unprotected workers will turn to totalitarian regimes.

Not one to sidestep a media-distorted issue, Meda opens with a head-on treatment of the popular anthem about how the French have lost their taste for work. Marshaling data from large-scale surveys, she demonstrates that it's not workers who have changed but work, sped-up, fragmented, stress-intensified, physically debilitating and emptied of meaning. In the second of her four chapters, Meda demonstrates how unemployment is a choice within neo-liberal economics but not an inevitability if firms and their market environment are differently organized. Making work scarce is a scare tactic: look at how automation hasn't put people out of work but has turned them into click-workers. The breadth of sources and clarity of Meda's exposition make this section a concise, detailed handbook of what has gone wrong with our economic systems since WWII.

All of this must change in a transition to a more commonsensical, down-to-earth and sustainable (in both ecological and human terms) way of living together, which is the subject of the fourth and final chapter. En route, Dominique Meda devotes a third chapter to what she sees as vital steps: re-establishing the EU on social (and therefore political) foundations; gender equality that recognizes the (past, present and above all future) roles women play in work and the economy; and rebuilding and re-gilding the much-maligned welfare state. Exegeting a broad literature, and with a keen sense of history, she demonstrates what went wrong in each of these areas, how to put it right, and why this is important. Finally, Meda takes a close look at what is for her the beginning point of ecological conversion of our economic societies, that is, the question of growth and what we measure as wealth. An expert critic of national accounting schemes, Meda argues for an era of temperance to be ushered in by broadening what we count as human and social good(s), including a non-depleted natural milieu, and a redefinition of growth in what she prefers to call a post-growth society. Who knows, the massive efforts needed for reconversion may trigger economic growth especially when redefined, just as they will likely lead to full employment and more meaningful forms of work.

Unlike the utopian socialists of a former time – whose sense of a terminally unjust society she shares, Dominique Meda brings her own work as well as a prodigious knowledge of other research including relevant data studies to support concrete steps through collective action to achieve a society that survives because humans thrive. All in 140 lucid pages including a fascinating ten page bibliography.