Hubert Etienne is a doctoral student in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and teaches at Sciences Po and HEC. He recently published
Le Cens de l'Etat: Understanding the Political Crisis through Fiscal Modernity
(Les belles lettres, 2022).
FIGAROVOX. - Your book aims to understand the “political crisis” by analyzing the evolution of our relationship to taxation. How does taxation make it possible to understand the metamorphoses of our society?
Hubert ETIENNE. -
Tax is the most direct expression of the relationship between the individual and the State.
The ways of calculating it, collecting it and using it have changed over the centuries but there has always been some form of tax in societies structured around a public organization.
This was already the case with the Greeks and the Romans and we can consider that it was also with the so-called archaic societies.
As it had been thought of during the Revolution, in opposition to medieval taxation, the tax was a sacrifice made by everyone to finance the action of the State with a view to certain common goals which are the security of goods and people.
In their evolution, the rules of taxation testify to a certain idea of social justice in which a population recognizes itself.
Through the objects it affects, the tax illustrates societal choices like the taxes on tobacco and alcohol which affect behaviors that we seek to discourage.
But even more, by the way in which this tax is decided, implemented, and by the level of consent of the population, it informs us about the relationship between a State and its citizens.
What I show in this book is that choices that may seem trivial, such as source deduction or wage garnishment, are in fact very meaningful.
They testify to profound changes in the way the State perceives its action and the role it assigns to citizens.
You explain that the automated payment of taxes illustrates the loss of the link between the administration and the citizen. Should we regret this dematerialization?
It is not so much a loss of link as an evolution of this link.
The link necessarily remains because, at best, some can change nationality, but no one can ignore the State and its tax.
What the automated payment of taxes tells us about our society (through withholding at source but also through the attachment of wages or bank accounts) is the growing power of the state and the freedoms it takes on citizens' rights.
These liberties of the state against the citizen, I do not hesitate to call them unconstitutional because they violate the principles of our “constitutionality bloc”.
Hiding taxes is nothing new.
It responds to the old adage inherited from the Old Regime that good taxation is as effective as it manages to "pluck the goose to get as many feathers as possible with as little shouting as possible".
Hubert Etienne
The payment of taxes, like obedience to any other democratic law, must proceed not from coercion but from consent.
It will be agreed that this consent has always been very relative since the tax is more "imposed" than "proposed" to individuals.
But what is interesting is the evolution of the balance of power and the way in which this evolution modifies the conception that the State has of individuals.
Over the past century, tax administration has structured itself so that the state can always tax more with less and less concern for individual consent.
It is because the means of opposing the state have drastically diminished that the latter no longer sees the population as the source of its legitimacy,
neither as an actor with whom we negotiate, but as a constraint to be evacuated.
This is how we arrive at an automated taxation which is not bad in itself but dangerous by what it tells us about the evolution of society.
In addition to being disembodied, tax prescription is often concealed, with indirect taxes such as VAT. How do you interpret this concealment?
Hiding taxes is nothing new.
It responds to the old adage inherited from the Old Regime that good taxation is as effective as it manages to "pluck the goose to obtain as many feathers as possible with as little shouting as possible".
We could therefore even congratulate ourselves on the fact that VAT provides half of tax revenue while crystallizing relatively little frustration, unlike income tax or inheritance tax.
And yet, VAT is a complete oddity.
Nowadays, most contributions are collected directly by the State without compensation.
They affect income or wealth specific to individuals, which therefore makes them personalized taxes.
Before, it was just the opposite.
Taxation was essentially indirect, depersonalized and came with a quid pro quo: taxes were paid in exchange for a service.
The programmed abolition of the audiovisual license fee and the housing tax are part of this trend.
The advantage of taxes is to give visibility to the contributor on the counterpart of his tax.
Introduced in 1957, the VAT therefore presents itself as a break in the new tax practices.
It reintroduces a tax but without compensation.
It does not affect individual income but all consumption and tends to blend into prices so as to lose its visibility.
It only exists because it is a way to get a lot of feathers with little shouting.
In the Middle Ages, the local tax was due to the lord in exchange for protection;
it was punctually raised across the kingdom to go to war.
The thinkers of the rule of law during the Revolution made it an instrument to finance the services of the State.
Hubert Etienne
Through incentive taxation, it is also the human rationalization project that you are criticizing. Why ?
Taxation does not directly rationalize individuals but it is based on a large-scale rationalization work.
Michel Foucault was one of the first to grasp the reasons.
From the 17th century, European leaders understood that the power of the state did not reside in the conquest of new territories but in its ability to govern a population to obtain what it wanted.
It was then necessary for the State to develop a detailed knowledge of its population, which the liberal economists got down to from a very rudimentary vision of the mechanisms of decision-making: the maximization of profits.
The development of statistics then made it possible to deploy an architecture for collecting
This development poses a double problem.
First, individuals tend to conform to the image they are given of themselves so as to marry this representation.
This is how the local populations became the French people, all the easier to govern for conforming to the model that the State had prepared for them.
Incentive taxation would not work without it, so that reducing taxation on certain activities, as the Pinel law does, is immediately identified by the targeted players as an investment opportunity that will meet the needs of the State.
The second problem is that this model of man is foreign to any form of morality: taxation is no longer a duty one could be proud of.
Some taxes are also assigned the objective of modifying behavior. Does this tax incentive represent a break in the history of taxation?
There is no break but new currents of thought which gradually impose themselves and transform society.
In the Middle Ages, the local tax was due to the lord in exchange for protection;
it was punctually raised across the kingdom to go to war.
The thinkers of the rule of law in the Revolution made it an instrument to finance the services of the State and the consent to the tax, at a time when one could still oppose it by arms, manifested citizens' adherence to a collective project.
To this first function was added that of redistributing part of the wealth produced within the framework of what has been called the welfare state.
The goal was more economic than moral, poverty being seen as a brake on
We can still move towards a tax system that increases consent rather than fueling resentment.
Hubert Etienne
A third function then imposed itself with Keynesian theories: behavioral governance.
As soon as the State finds its legitimacy in its competence to influence certain aggregates such as GDP growth or the unemployment rate, it is entitled to put in place all useful measures to achieve these objectives.
He will raise tobacco taxes to discourage people from smoking in order to reduce the social security deficit, raise customs tariffs to encourage domestic consumption in favor of the trade balance, tax diesel vehicles to promote less polluting industries.
The individual is no longer a subject of rights but the instrument of a total mobilization of wealth and energy in a space of unlimited inter-state competition.
Faced with a tax that you never really consider granted, you propose a voluntary taxation through the "democratic gift", based on honor. Isn't this a utopian project?
A tax-free society is not out of reach, as evidenced by some Gulf states that finance themselves entirely through the nationalization of strategic activities.
However, this is not what I am proposing because my criticism is not so much about the unprecedented levels of taxation put in place in France for a century as about the logic of their implementation.
The tax has never been genuinely granted and what matters is not to take this step but to tend towards this ideal.
It is first of all a question of taking the measure of this general dynamic which has transformed society for two centuries and which taxation makes apparent.
This will perhaps make it possible to ask fundamental questions about the degraded relationship between the citizen and the State which cannot be reduced, in matters of taxation, to throwing quotas at each other's faces as economists and politicians do.
It is then a question of reflecting on the means of financing the rule of law without the latter arrogating to itself the freedom to govern behavior, a totalitarian twist which is accentuated day by day.
We can still move towards a tax system that increases consent rather than fueling resentment.
Profiting from social rivalries among those seeking to build a public reputation like this
is the case of the financing of American universities seems to me to be an interesting mechanism to study;
that is what I propose in this book.