Post-Dirigisme and the Political Economy of French Capitalist Restructuring in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis

This paper explores the particularities of contemporary French capitalism, advancing a post-dirigiste interpretation which emphasises distinctive ideational building blocks of market-making and economic policy-making in France and considering its potential as an alternative growth model. It demonstrates the pay-off of an ideationally attuned approach to analysing the political economy of contemporary capitalism through analysis of French capitalist restructuring over the last 25 years, placing it in comparative context. A modus operandi for such ideational explanation is elaborated through delineating different national conceptions of the market, and setting out their impacts on practices of market-making. The claim made in this article is that understanding the evolution of French capitalism requires recognition of the ongoing market-making role of the French State, in combination with the French conception of the market and its embedding within a social context characterised by the inter-penetration of public and private elitist networks of France’s ‘financial network economy’ which remains substantially intact. The ideational dimension is crucial because French understandings of the market and competition, the ideational building blocks of market-making, inform French state interventions and leave footprints on French institutions and market structures, and the evolutionary trajectory of French capitalism. In charting this trajectory, this deploys the concept of post-dirigisme. We map out the parameters and causes of the post-dirigiste condition in France and highlight how constraints on French economic policy-makers restrain the scope for discretionary, activist and interventionary economic policies such that their reach exceeds their grasp.