From the Publisher
“For a brief period, from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, it looked as if France was turning its back from the dirigisme of earlier decades and adopting a more (classically) liberal outlook on economic and global affairs. (Progressive “liberalism” in the American sense has no meaning in the French cultural context.). But the wind turned, and as Kevin Brookes brilliantly demonstrates with a wealth of data, public opinion shifted. Whether one considers opinion polls, voting patterns or public policy, French exceptionalism in the 21st century stands out: no other country in the Western world has proved more hostile to (neo)liberalism than France, even though many politicians and public intellectuals continue to insist that (neo)liberalism has won the day. Brookes very cogently analyzes the convergence of many other (historical, structural, etc.) factors besides public opinion to write an excellent book that should be of interest not only to students of French politicsbut also political economy and the history of ideas”.
—Laurent Dobuzinskis, Simon Fraser University, Canada
"One of the greatest mysteries in the political sociology of France is the absence of a strong liberal party in a country that generated the 1789 revolution, human rights and numerous authors central to the classical liberal tradition, including Jean-Baptiste Say and Frédéric Bastiat. Kevin Brookes lifts the veil on this question using surveys, interviews, statistical series and an original theoretical framework. Liberalism is weak in France due to the high justification costs that attend a multitude of institutional factors (such as the status of the senior administration in the construction of public policy choices and the ideological biases induced by the public funding of social science research) as well as to the failure of Jacques Chirac in the 1988 presidential election. To understand the French status quo and the country’s inabilityto reform itself, this book is a must-read."
— François Facchini, Professor of Economics, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.