Can States Be Moral?

Preface to the English Edition

What is a state? Answers to this question vary, depending on whether they are
provided by a political philosopher, a political scientist, a legal scholar, or a
historian. In the present book, we propose our own response as sociologists and
anthropologists. But rather than in its disciplinary configuration, the specificity
of our approach resides in its method: ethnography. A political organization
governing a given territory and its population, the state is generally studied in
terms of its formation, structure, functions, laws, and relations with other similar
entities. Such an approach presupposes not only a macropolitical perspective,
which tends to produce a relatively abstract representation from above, but also an
a priori definition, which delimits the scope of the study.
Our method adopts a symmetrical view. It is inductive, micropolitical, and from
below. It is based on the participant observation of various institutions through
the routine work of their agents and the everyday interactions with their publics.
We do not determine in advance what the police, the justice system, the prison
apparatus, the welfare services, and the mental health facilities are, but we examine
the situations and problems which the people who belong to these institutions are
confronted with, and analyze how they manage them: our theory of the state is
therefore constructed empirically. We do not presume that it is a unified entity,
but explore the diversity of its rationalities: we analyze, for instance, the tensions
and contradictions existing between the logics of security and rights, the principles
of coercion and responsibility. The state, we believe, is what its agents do under
the multiple influences of the policies they implement, the habits they develop,
the initiatives they take, and the responses they get from their publics. By inverting
traditional perspectives, whether they be normative or deductive, ethnography
thus offers a unique way of approaching the state.
But the question “what is a state?” only makes sense within a given national
context at a particular historical moment. The word “state” does not mean or
evoke the same thing in France, where our study was conducted as it does in the
United States, where it may be discussed. In the French context, there is a certain
self-evidence of the state, built over a thousand years. It benefits from an enduring
legitimacy and raises high expectations. Strong and centralized, it defines most
norms and policies. In contrast, in the United States, the word can suggest either
the federal state or one of the fifty entities which comprise it. In the first case,
it is an institution with limited prerogatives and declining legitimacy in most
domains, except those of national security and foreign affairs. In the second one, it
x CAN STATES BE MORAL?

is only a component of a larger political set but has a substantial autonomy as far as
executive, legislative and judicial powers are concerned. Consequently, to mention
the state when referring to the justice or prison system implies the government
of the whole country in France and of only one of its fifty parts in the United
States. The same expression thus corresponds to entirely distinct realities not only
in terms of denotation (what it means) but also of connotation (what it evokes).
The reader should keep this dual difference—of meaning and evocation—in mind
when going through the various chapters.
But even within a national context, both denotation and connotation evolve
over time. Thus, in the case of France, what the state is and what it does as well as
what image is associated with it has changed over the last half-century in France,
transforming from an authoritarian Gaullist regime at the start of the Fifth Republic
with its planned economy and nationalized companies to the Conservative and
Socialist governments of today which are equally beholden to neoliberal ideology
and anti-Keynesian policies: not only has the role of the state changed, summed
up by the famously disheartening phrase of a prime minister “the state cannot do
everything,” but so too has its legitimacy, which today is increasingly challenged.
In other words, the state is always situated both geographically and historically.
Classical theories of the state, from Bodin and Hobbes to Marx and Weber,
tend to represent it as a distant entity and even as a sort of “cold monster.”
Seen through an ethnographic lens, however, it becomes a distinct reality. The
proximity with the agents reveals the warmer side of the state, so to speak. It is
more than a bureaucracy with rules and procedures. Officers, magistrates, guards,
social workers, mental health specialists also act on the basis of values and affects.
Justice and fairness, concern or indifference, empathy or indignation, admiration
or distrust are part of their experience in their relations, not only with their
public but also with their colleagues, their superiors, and their institution. They
inform their daily decisions and actions but are also informed by the ethos of their
profession and the ethical climate of the public sphere. Professional principles of
rigor, respect, accountability—or the lack thereof—and public debates stigmatizing
certain behaviors, blaming certain populations, insinuating suspicion toward
certain groups—or adopting the symmetrical perspectives—influence what the
agents think and do.
At the macrosocial level, moral economies correspond to how values and
affects are produced, circulate, and are appropriated around a given situation
that society construes as a problem: immigration, asylum, crime, punishment,
etc. At the microsocial level, moral subjectivities reveal the values and affects
involved in the ethical issues and dilemmas faced by the agents with respect to
these problems: freeing an undocumented foreigner or keeping him in detention,
granting a claimant refugee status or rejecting his request, arresting a suspect for a
minor offense or letting him go, applying mandatory prison sentences or choosing
individualized punishment, etc. Moral subjectivities are influenced by moral
economies, which in turn reinforce, contest, or displace. The way immigration,
asylum, crime, and punishment are publicly debated weighs on the decisions of
 CAN STATES BE MORAL? xi

the agents, whose actions confirm, challenge, or inflect the terms of the debate.
Thus, values and affects insinuate themselves everywhere in the government of
populations: it is this moral life of the state that we are interested in.
Because these populations are socially, economically and often legally
precarious, their government involves three rationalities: the welfare state, which
protects the subjects from the hazards of life; the penal state, which decides which
crime to punish and how, and the liberal state, which mobilizes simultaneously
individual rights and individual obligations. In the past decades, the decline of
the welfare state has been paralleled by the expansion of the penal state, while the
liberal state has appeared as a way to legitimize the former evolution by invoking
the responsibility of the subject and to mitigate the latter trend by introducing
minimal legal guarantees. This ambiguous moral configuration is a unique feature
of the contemporary state.
Didier Fassin
January 2015
 Introduction
Governing Precarity
Didier Fassin

Three police officers from an anti-crime squad are cruising the streets of a
downtown area in an unmarked car when they come across a van with two non-
European-looking men inside; they decide to turn around, stop the vehicle, check
the identities of the driver and his passenger, both Kurds, discover that the latter
does not have a residence permit, and arrest him despite the pleas of the former,
bluntly informing him that they are only doing their job. When they arrive back
at the police station with the arrestee, their colleagues begin to crack jokes about
their tendency to achieve their quotas by arresting undocumented immigrants
rather than real criminals, like they are supposed to. The squad leader replies that
he at least is defending his country against illegal immigration.
A young man of African descent listens to the charges of theft brought against him
at an immediate appearance trial. Stopped and frisked in the lobby of his apartment
building as he was returning home, law enforcement agents found in his possession
several lunch vouchers in someone else’s name. The man is further accused of
insulting the police officers and resisting arrest. Although the prosecutor requests a
one-year prison sentence and the lawyer for the officer demands punitive damages,
the magistrates decide not to hand down the minimum sentence prescribed in
cases of recidivism but instead determine on the basis of the social worker’s report
that the youth’s family context and employment situation allow for a three-month
suspended sentence. This will permit the judge overseeing the execution of the
man’s sentence to assign an alternative punishment rather than incarceration.
A disciplinary board comprised of a prison administrator and two guards judges
an inmate accused of possessing of a cellular phone at a correctional facility. The
man, an immigrant who had entered the country illegally, admits to the facts of the
case, while his court-appointed lawyer attempts to offer an excuse, explaining that,
isolated and marginalized, he just wanted to communicate with his family. While
in deliberation, the three officials agree to consider that the man, a victim of the
local prison gang, confessed in order to protect himself from reprisal. Hesitating
over a sentence which would also take into account his vulnerability, but also
confronted with a lack of space in the less restrictive seclusion cells, they end up
placing him in solitary confinement, albeit for a shorter time than is called for
according to disciplinary guidelines.