Le culte de l'incompétence by Émile Faguet
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"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.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Faguet, Émile, 1847-1916 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 41042055 |
| Title | Le culte de l'incompétence |
| Original Publication | Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1910. |
| Series Title | Les études contemporaines |
| Credits | Laurent Vogel (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica)) |
| Reading Level | Reading ease score: 61.7 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read. |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | JC: Political science: Political theory |
| Subject | Democracy |
| Subject | France -- Politics and government |
| Subject | Mental efficiency |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 76395 |
| Release Date | Jun 27, 2025 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 233 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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