Marchés, experts et démocratie. La science économique et le risque d’un « despotisme doux »

This article examines the relationship between market freedom, economic expertise, and democratic government in contemporary liberal societies. Over the past decades, certain ideas developed within economic science have gradually been incorporated into institutional arrangements - independent central banks, fiscal rules, and the multilateral architecture of international trade - that structure the governance of market economies. While this institutionalization of economic knowledge is often presented as a way of shielding certain decisions from the contingencies of politics, it also tends to transform contested analytical assumptions into seemingly technical constraints. Drawing on Tocqueville’s intuition of the risk of a “soft despotism,” the article shows how this dynamic may contribute to a gradual depoliticization of collective choices. For liberal democracies, the challenge is therefore to preserve a living articulation between the freedom of markets and democratic deliberation.