ABSTRACT
What is it that allows certain chosen or elected individuals to surmount the entry barriers to the political field and obtain a position and lasting presence there? The very improbability of this event means that an explanation is required. As seen in the previous chapter, explanations based on personal motivation or ambition are appealing for reasons that range from the ex ante justification provided by democratic theory itself, with its rhetoric that individuals’ virtuosity and virtue are the key to understanding their political success, through to the ex post rationalisations of their own lives mooted by politicians in their memoirs or when giving biographical interviews (generally when on the point of retiring from public life). If these two explanations do not suffice, it is not because the field’s agents lie or because democratic theory lacks basis. Both have enough grounds and elements of truth to be plausible. The problem lies elsewhere. If democratic theory and the normative ideal subscribed to by politicians fall short in offering a full and realistic explanation of their life histories, it is because individuals are far from equal in interests, vocation, ambition, political “capabilities” and, particularly, competence (Elkin and Soltan 1999; Joignant 2004, 2007; Gaxie 2007). In the political field, the notion of competence or the idea of what we can and know how to do takes the form of a feeling or, more precisely, a predisposition to feel authorised to speak in public, to have an opinion on public or controversial matters and to promote and defend this opinion – that is, a set of attributes that are characteristic of politically competent agents. Recognising inequalities in competence has always been a problem for democratic theory (hence, the tacitly competence-based reason for a minimum voting age, with the vote of those aged 18 or over seen today as the enlightened expression of a competent voter). In the everyday rhetoric of the field’s agents, these inequalities tend to be sidestepped by attributing them to differences between individuals, perhaps in tastes and preferences, but above all in exercise of the freedom to vote or abstain and be interested or not in political activity, thereby implying that their explanation lies in people, rather than the political field itself. 1 Initial political inequality establishes separations and differences between those who have successfully entered the field and those who have failed to do so or have simply never attempted to do so. However, 40as will be seen in Chapter 5, political inequality also has to do with hierarchies within the political field, whether based on origin, social background or, of course, the type of career developed there. All of these hierarchies go to make up a field where there have to be winners and losers and dominant and dominated agents. What is characteristic of this field is that the relationship between dominant and dominated agents is explained by political reasons (by change: “the people voted for the left” or, on the contrary, by perseverance – that is, for the right) and not for reasons which the field’s operation rejects, precisely because they call into question the egalitarian foundations implicit in political liberalism.
