Alain Supiot
A
lain Supiot is a legal scholar from Nantes specializing in labor law, social security and legal theory. Professor at the University of Poitiers and then at the University of Nantes, where he spent most of his career, since 2012 he has been Professor at the Collège de France in the "État social et mondialisation. Legal analysis of solidarity". He is a member of the International Labour Organization's Global Commission on the Future of Work.
In 1993, he founded the Maison des sciences de l'Homme Ange Guépin 2 in Nantes, and in 2008, the Institut d'études avancées de Nantes (Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies), which welcomes around 30 researchers from a wide range of disciplines and geographical backgrounds each year for a scientific residency, and aims to be a place of intellectual innovation and an incubator for new, sustainable scientific collaboration networks.
Research topics
Alain Supiot is a leading scientist whose research focuses on two complementary fields: labor law and legal theory. An invention of the 20th century, labor law is not, for Alain Supiot, simply a system of rules, but rather a tool for analyzing societies. Combining law with the social sciences - he is as much a master of Durkheim and Marx as he is of Weber - he studies the interactions between labor law and competition and market law. In his Critique du droit du travail (1994, 2nd ed. 2007, 3rd ed. 2015), which has become a great classic, he sets out to highlight the contradictions of which labor law is a synthesis, and undertakes to dismantle the workings of this branch of law. In addition to a "trial by law" and disordered hypernomia, he offers a brilliant reflection on work itself, which law and the market economy artificially separate from the person of the worker (he argues, moreover, that labor law comes under the law of persons): where to situate work between the person and the thing? How can the free worker be subjected to the power of his equal? Where does the law derive its legitimacy from, and what is the role of the jurist? to conclude that work is a "shared freedom".
His current research focuses on transformations in the organization of the economy and their impact on the evolution of institutions, the erosion of legal protection for workers and the social state under the constraints of globalization.
In 1997, the European Commission commissioned Alain Supiot to lead an international, interdisciplinary group of researchers on The transformation of work and the future of labor law in Europe. The resulting report (Au-delà de l'emploi, 1999, and 2nd ed. 2016) calls for a renewal of the European social model. Pointing in turn to the effects of EU enlargement, which has deconstructed solidarity and fuelled the race for the lowest social standards, the financial crisis, the divide between workers included in social protection and all those excluded (so-called atypical workers, the self-employed, housewives), the war on competitiveness, the growing discontinuity of career paths, and the new technologies that have produced new forms of dehumanization of work by subjecting workers to "instantaneous computer time", he advocates rethinking work and the rights that go with it, and thinking about economic security beyond employment. He thus imagined the introduction of new individual rights, no longer attached to the job held, but to the person of the worker, called "social drawing rights": a claim that can be asserted to train, commit to a humanitarian mission, change career direction, and so on. A professional status adapted to the modern worker, encompassing all forms of work and not just that which emerged in the Fordist era, would thus make it possible to overcome the apparent paradox between the need for job stability and professional mobility, as it would guarantee social protection beyond employment. Translated into several languages and remarkably well argued, this book provides food for legal and political thought on the future of labor law in modern society.
Far from being just an expert on labor law, far even from being just a theorist of labor law, Alain Supiot is also, in his own way, a theorist of law in general. This is because the contemporary transformations of labor law have led him to revisit the very idea of Law, or more precisely, the nature of Law (the capital letter is Alain Supiot's own).
His most accomplished work on the subject (Homo juridicus. Essai sur la fonction anthropologique du droit, Paris, Seuil, 2005) follows in Pierre Legendre's footsteps, and attempts to restore nobility to the term "legal dogmatics". Firmly rooted in a jusnaturalistic conception, Alain Supiot insists on the instituting dimension of law, a bearer of meaning and the only one capable, in Western thought, of linking the biological and symbolic dimensions that make up the human being. Law cannot therefore be reduced to the laws of biology or economics. As a transcendent Reason or Reference, towering over human societies, law synthesizes the beliefs and values that structure them, and without which they would be doomed to anomie, or even anarchy. Drawing on a number of works in legal anthropology, Alain Supiot puts forward the debatable idea that "the aspiration to Justice [...] represents [...] a fundamental anthropological fact" (p. 9). Around this traditional question of the nature of law, Alain Supiot offers a stimulating yet debatable analysis of highly topical issues: globalization and the potentially infinite extension of the competitive logic, the decline of the State and law in favor of the market and contract, the internationalization of human rights, and developments in filiation. The book bears witness to exceptional erudition and an uncommon ability to link debates on legal technique to issues highlighted by history and the social sciences.
Teaching
In Homo juridicus, Alain Supiot addressed the tendency of contemporary Western societies to replace the instituting reason of law with the calculating reason characteristic of modern capitalism and science. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, he revisits this evolution, which goes hand in hand with the shift from government by laws to governance by numbers. While laws and numbers share common traits (such as a general, impersonal dimension), they differ in many ways: while the former reflect both a choice of values and an authority that sets and assumes these choices - these two aspects corresponding fairly exactly to Alain Supiot's conception of law in Homo juridicus - the latter are supposed to be no more than a supposedly neutral reflection of reality (the concern for justice being remarkably absent), and to call only for adjustment mechanisms with a view to restoring the general equilibrium of things. The popularity of governance by numbers reveals "the utopia of a flat world, entirely governed by the laws of the market" and indexed to utility alone. The emergence of this form of governance has led to a retreat from institutions and legal frameworks, fostering the development of bonds of allegiance that subject individuals to the law of the strongest, reminiscent of the feudal relationship of vassalage. Far from limiting himself to abstract and general considerations, Alain Supiot claims to spot numerous traces of this trend in very concrete fields, among which it is not surprising to find the world of salaried work: a phenomenon as current as the uberization of the economy seems to echo these analyses.
The book based on these lectures at the Collège de France (La gouvernance par les nombres, Paris, Fayard, 2015) reflects Alain Supiot's eminent qualities: a brilliant mastery of the data of legal experience, the ability to illuminate this data with contributions from legal theory and the social sciences, and a sometimes vigorous participation in debates on ideas through positions that are frank and assertive, but always remarkably well argued.
