000 02938cam a22003733u 4500
001 76395
003 UtSlPG
005 20260610134752.0
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010 _a41042055
040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _afr
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aJC
100 1 _aFaguet, Émile,
_d1847-1916
245 1 3 _aLe culte de l'incompétence
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2025
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
490 1 _aLes études contemporaines
500 _aRelease date is 2025-06-27
508 _aLaurent Vogel (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica))
520 _a"Le culte de l'incompétence" by Émile Faguet is a political essay written in the early 20th century. It argues that mass democracies, intent on equality and direct control, displace specialized competence with passion-driven representation, leading parliaments to govern, administer, and legislate poorly. The work contrasts this drift with an ideal of informed, moderate, and detached lawmaking and warns of a polity that politicizes every function and churns out reactive, short-lived laws. The opening of the essay situates the book within a contemporary studies series, then revisits Montesquieu’s idea that each regime has a guiding principle to claim that democracy’s is the worship of incompetence. Faguet illustrates how popular sovereignty erodes specialization: Athens replaced trained judges with paid jurors; modern democracies evolved from filtered elections to direct representation that rewards passion over expertise, producing “politicians” dependent on the crowd. He shows the legislature usurping executive and administrative roles, dictating appointments and decisions, distrusting inamovibility, and turning governance into partisan oversight, while genuine competence retreats to private professions that the state seeks to nationalize; even socialism, he argues, would slide toward despotism. He then sketches the truly competent legislator—well informed about a people’s temperament, moderate, and free of passion—favoring insinuation over command and prudence in changing laws, before concluding that democracy instead elects impassioned, uninformed lawmakers who pass episodic, event-driven measures like a daily newspaper. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cParis: Bernard Grasset, 1910
653 _aDemocracy
653 _aFrance -- Politics and government
653 _aMental efficiency
830 0 _aLes études contemporaines
856 4 _uhttps://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2069186
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76395
999 _c117120
_d117120