This year's lecture was an extension of last year's lecture on governance by numbers. This type of governance shares with government by law the ideal of a society whose rules derive from an impersonal source, not from the will of the powerful. It's this ideal that Plato portrayed when he spoke of a city in which "the law reigned supreme over men, instead of men being the tyrants of the law". But as this formula also makes clear, in this form of government, the law "reigns supreme". In other words, it represents a heteronomous authority, and this heteronomy is the primary condition for the autonomy enjoyed by the men who live under its rule. Governance by numbers, on the other hand, treats society as a machine, governed by impersonal rules that are immanent to its functioning. In other words, as a society purged of all heteronomy, driven by a program inherent in its very being. Its main characteristic, then, is to liquidate the heteronomy of law, turning it into a simple instrument for implementing rationality through calculation.
Such a desire to erase heteronomy necessarily calls into question the submission of private law relationships to a public order that guarantees the general interest. This challenge is often described in terms of the "privatization" of power and norms. However, to reduce these transformations to a process of privatization would be to accept, without even having discussed it, the hypothesis that a legal order could be reduced to a pure system of private law, populated by contracting particles and governed by calculation. Legal analysis brings to light a more complex situation, a hybridization of the public and the private, which can be seen in the generalization of bonds of allegiance between people.