Patrick Hunout, The New Leviathan, and Social Capital
President Hunout is an innovative Franco-Belgian researcher and social reformer, whose work explores the formation of what he names The New Leviathan around the hypothesis that the upper class of society seeks to build a new order based on less equality and less democracy.
Dr Hunout in La Hulpe, Belgium.
As from the middle of the nineties, Hunout started to work on the contemporary economic and societal crisis. He elaborated the Tripartite Model of Societal Change that describes the interactions between three fields that are usually considered separately: economic relationships, interethnic relationships, and interpersonal relationships. His research work involved immigration policies and ethnicity (1996), the formation of a new EU state machinery opposed to civil freedom (1998), and the problematic transformations of the interpersonal relationships (2003-2004), including the escalation of anomie, suicide, depression, social isolation and incivility, the crisis of marriage and the family, and the weakening of trust and commitment.
His model suggests that, contrary to a common view, the strategies carried forward by the New Leviathan intimately link these three fields. They consist in developing a globalized, flexible economy widening revenue inequalities (economic field), in promoting mass migrations and a multi-ethnic society (ethnic field), and in pushing forward individualist, hedonist and consumerist values (interpersonal field). The fields are interactive, actions taken in one field helping the implementation of actions in other fields. These strategies design a weak society, enslaved to market values and government controls required by the increasing incapacity of an atomized social body to manage itself.
The strategies carried forward by a ruling class that refuses to share wealth and power, explain most contemporary difficulties - if they would be reversed, a huge improvement would follow. Economies similar to the historical ‘social market economy’ based on an equitable sharing of the wealth as well as citizen-, consumer- and worker participation, are the most performing. Replacing immigration with local employment would result in better training and employment policies, the automation of unskilled tasks, life-long voluntary employment, and higher salaries – thus allowing the resorption of social security deficit. A stronger cultural identity and more community spirit would result in higher trust, more empathy and cooperation, more efficient conflict resolution, and better mental and general health within society.
Hunout created in 2002 The Social Capital Foundation—the aim of which is to help restore, revitalize and strengthen the community spirit as the best way to advance this agenda.The Social Capital Foundation proposes to counter the policies of The New Leviathan by consolidating the community spirit, developing a democratic middle-class centered society, promoting an equitable share of wealth, protecting cultural identity against mass migrations, and strengthening shared values within the social body.
Hunout objects the formation of a new proletariat, due to increased poverty, poor education and the recourse to mass immigration from third-world countries, as a way to refuse to enter modernity and as a mean to go back into old systems of governance within a highly stratified society. He advocates instead the modernization of our economies through the constitution of a large, educated and skilled middle-class of local origin, enjoying high revenues thanks to an equitable allocation of wealth, sharing common values based on their heritage, and participating in decisions of common interest.
