The Urgent Need for Reform

We print here an extract, ahead of publication, from the new book by Edgard Pisani, Vive la révolte! (Hurray for Revolt), which is due out in early November of 2006 (Paris: Seuil). The extract is from a chapter entitled “Aims and method: starting from needs”. According to the author’s own terms, “whether as witnesses or active participants, we are living through a fascinating, demanding and dangerous period. One story is over, another seems to be beginning but we are having trouble following what it’s about and meanwhile the clumsiness and the impotence of politics stirs up in each one of us feelings of disquiet and revolt.”
Edgard Pisani starts from this observation, on which he enlarges in the first part of the book, and argues that politics as we see it in France today cannot play the rôle expected of it, that “central and local government have been subjected to over-eager treatment, which was not based on a clear diagnosis nor guided by a clear vision”. He makes a plea in the book for the rehabilitation of politics – a return to politics in its noblest form.
In particular, in the chapter we reprint here, he insists on the need for “systemic reform” and he sets out the goals and the methods this requires.