Plathon

Nowadays, the term "norm" does not have a good reputation. Not a week goes by without hearing about the weaknesses and hesitations of a new normative initiative (often European), the resistance of a profession against a new technical norm that complicates a certain production process, or the revolt of a segment of the population against a social convention deemed archaic, unjust, or oppressive.

Indeed, the public perception is one of an accumulation of increasingly complex and distant norms. Of a technocratic superstructure where economic power dominates and dissolves political power. This growing public perception of the distant and technocratic nature of increasingly numerous norms results in a decreasing acceptance from citizens.

The idea of an inflation of norms, or "regulatory inflation", has spread in recent years, particularly in political and legal circles. Statistics made available by governments show a significant increase in the total number of normative texts over decades, but also in the volume of these texts (for example for France here, or for UK here). For European Union countries, such national statistics do not even capture the considerable normative production of the Union, whose regulations and other directly applicable texts add to these figures.

This regulatory inflation is not without its conflicts. The beginning of 2024 was marked, especially in France but also in other European countries, by a massive protest movement from the agricultural sector against the introduction of new norms. The issue of "hedges", among others, fueled passions, particularly a new regulation that prohibits trimming them for half of the year to protect nesting. This new norm triggered a long-contained fury, with stakeholders denouncing the absurdity and counterproductivity of some norms that discourage the initiatives they intend to promote, the administrative rigidity of rules that seem to ignore the natural reality of the seasons and harvests cycle, and more generally what appears as a heterogeneous, incoherent, and impracticable normative obsession.

"Ignorantia juris non excusat", but is that still possible? Some norms stand out with prescriptions bordering on incomprehensible. The Swiss reader will remember the irrepressible laughter of the former President of the Confederation himself, Hans-Rudolf Merz, during his speech to Parliament in September 2010; laughter provoked by the exceptional dryness of a text written in an abstruse administrative jargon and seemingly lacking common sense (see here, 1min48sec). Normative inflation seems to slowly but surely lead us to the kingdom of Absurdia.

But, after all, what is a norm?

The common use of the term, rather vague, lends itself to confusion. The word "norm" changes meaning depending on the context in which it is used and will have synonyms, from one sentence to another: rule, law, standard, principle, average, convention... The "norm" seems therefore to be able to refer to both the is (what is ordinary, descriptive) and the ought (what is prescriptive). The concept itself is of recent use: the term "norm" is not found in Plato, Aristotle, or even the philosophers of the Renaissance. It was only in the 19th century with the emergence of positivism and sociology that the use of the term became widespread. This recent development has allowed each author to propose their own definitions and establish their own uses, each slightly different.
We are thus faced with a semantic tangle and cannot avoid a brief definition exercise. If the term covers varied realities, it remains possible to distinguish two main categories:

1. Technical norms, or "standards", established and controlled by public bodies such as International Organization for Standardization (ISO). These norms delineate possibilities and reduce them to "recipes" that determine, for example, the spacing of a railway track, the voltage of an electrical circuit, or the steps in the preparation of a PDO cheese. Some of these norms seem to stem primarily from custom or history, such as the spacing of rails based on the width of a stagecoach compartment or the left-hand traffic for trains because their invention and initial use were in Great Britain.

2. Norms associated with a value judgment. We can call them "social norms", in a deliberate simplification that encompasses the sum of expectations and rules that govern conduct in a given society, whether legally formalized (positive law) or not (social conventions). An important nuance should of course be made between the law (which aims to be universal, a direct translation of the fundamental principles and values of a society; it states the why) and the norm in the strict sense (which is specific, prescribing an execution process; it states the how). However, both actually represent successive stages of one same normative process: translating into positive law the principles and values that underpin life in society.

It therefore seems possible to define the "norm" as any prescriptive formulation in terms of action, whether its origin is inherited from custom or history, or whether it is newly established in pursuit of a particular end. Thus, the very essence of the norm is to circumscribe the possible, to establish the limits within which action can be exercised, and thereby implies limiting the freedom to act — and consequently, the freedom to be.

In the professional world, the logic of competitiveness leads companies to develop tools to continually improve their productivity, a practice that leads to an increasing normalization of production methods (i.e. the prescriptive standardization of the expected result but also of the means to achieve it). But leads to seeking effectiveness by freezing people skills in reproducible methods and processes, increasingly constraining human activity and replacing humans with processes. This normalization (standardization) thus appears as an increasing instrumentalization of humans, distancing them from what constitutes their very humanity: their capacity for creativity.

In the social body, it is not uncommon for norms, which can lead to the exclusion or marginalization of a portion of the population, to be retrospectively considered as unjust, archaic, and oppressive when the values that underpinned their legitimacy have lost their strength — e.g. segregation laws in the United States until 1956, prohibition of women's suffrage in France until 1944, etc. This reality sometimes serves as a justification for a relativistic perspective according to which any norm would have no other foundation than being inherited from history and no other destiny than being replaced. In other words: an ephemeral expression of principles inherently relative to a given time and space.

The question of the acceptability of norms is therefore twofold. On one hand: who has the authority to dictate the norm (the legitimate power)? On the other hand: what are the reasons that justify it (the purpose and ends)?

Societies now called "traditional" most often base the acceptability of their normative system on divine legitimation. The divine authority legitimizes the normative authority of state power: the transcendent commandments of God or, in Western Christianity, of the Church. One can speak in this sense of "hetero-nomy" — the law is prescribed to me by a legitimate source external to me.

The humanism of the Enlightenment, in a movement properly revolutionary (similar to the "Copernican revolution"), dethrones God and places man at the center, as the primary source of moral (and in turn legal) legitimacy. From then on, norms find their foundation in the notions, among others, of natural law and social contract: individuals consent to relinquish a part of their "natural" individual freedom in exchange for the protection and security offered by a legitimate government, forming a civil society. This translation from vertical legitimacy to horizontal legitimacy bases the foundation of norms on their voluntary acceptance by humans: "obedience to a law that we prescribe to ourselves is liberty", according to Rousseau's famous formula (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762, Book 1, Chapter 8). In this sense, one can speak of "auto-nomy" — the law is legitimate because I give it to myself.

As a result, the empire of imposed norms gives way to the observance of accepted norms, and it is the acceptability of norms that makes them effective and operational. Acceptability revolves around three main axes:

• Competence of the authority that dictates them;
• Principles or values that guided their establishment: equality, universality, public good, intergenerational responsibility, etc.
• Feasibility: suitability to the situation, inconsistencies between norms, miscalculated collateral consequences, normative accumulation, etc.
  
  The restriction of freedom inherent in norms however also inevitably sparks an all-too-human desire to break free from it: every man "wishes to have a law which limits the freedom of all, however his […] impulses tempt him, where possible, to exempt himself from them" (Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784, Sixth thesis).
  
  This appetite for liberation from the normative straitjacket can take folkloric forms, such as naturism, which, besides the quest for a sense of purity through a return to nature, also seeks liberation from the gaze of others, and from societal judgment and conventions (so-called "body shame"). But it can also advance much further in challenging the normative system, as is done, for example, by libertarian ideology, favoring maximal reduction of state power and weight, especially in its normative power.
  
  In such a context, norms are perceived primarily as tools of social control, whose primary purpose would be to regulate the behavior of individuals and maintain power in society. In turn, contemporary individualistic demands tend to separate from the modern, universalist foundation of values. When they deem the universality and impartiality of laws unrealistic, individuals tend to assert their own singularity and make it the unique and exclusive source of their values. In this case, values are no longer what unites but what distinguishes, separates, and individualizes. They are no longer recognized as general norms but accepted as subjective beliefs to which each is inclined, not by will, but by sensitivity and based on their personal history and particular attachments, composing a personal identity different from others. The key word here is the right to "authenticity". It is no longer about granting similar rights to dissimilar individuals but about offering dissimilar rights to individuals who place their self-esteem in their own singularity.
  This leads to a perception of general relativity of norms and values: after all, everything is equal. My authenticity is the only source of legitimacy for my principles, my values, and the rules I agree to follow. Pushed to the extreme, this tendency is that of an individualism that calls itself "post-modern".
  
  The erosion of the acceptance of norms is thus not unrelated to the crisis of legitimacy that Western universalism is going through. Faced with the quest for an increasingly individualized approaches and "treatments", the regulatory ambition of any norm seems temporally out of sync, like the outdated ideal of another era that is now nothing more than a source of standardization (normalization), insensitive to the difference, singularity, and "authenticity" of each.
  
  But, by deconstructing everything, do we not lose common sense (con-sensus), the indispensable cement for the functioning of any social body? Does not a functional society require a common foundation of values widely (if not universally) shared by all citizens, which give to the limitations of freedom the strength of an accepted legitimacy? To deconstruct them without proposing a credible alternative model only contributes to the "meaning crisis" that occupies contemporary minds and is the subject of countless publications and debates. "Mass individualism lives off insignificance and the decline of universal values [...] It is a phenomenon that discovers the liberation of desire and the absolute immanence of pleasure. The post-modern individual does not recognize rules, does not bend to norms, is a desire that goes" (Monique Castillo et Romain Leroy-Castillo, La raison d’agir, Vrin, 2023, p. 64, not translated).
  
  The deconstructive approach thus quickly encounters its own limits and rediscovers the obvious: the norm is not only constraint, exclusion, distancing. It is also what brings together and contributes to building a community of meaning. Language norms, for example, form a set whose combination allows for abstraction, thought, and intercomprehension. In their combination, there is a sublimation of each individual norm into a set carrying meaning and infinite possibilities. The same goes for norms governing the social body: living in society is not simply limiting one's freedom, it is entering a world that each contributes to building.
  
  How, then, to renew in our contemporary societies the acceptability of norms after the collapse of traditional authorities that founded their legitimacy for several centuries? Until recently, authority rested on hierarchical position. But in our communication societies, with a perpetual flow of information, we only reach reality through the mediation of a meaning collectively given: coming from journalistic mediation, cognitive framing of policies, contradictory arguments from stakeholders, etc. The active participation of each citizen in the giving of meaning is vital in such society, where reality itself is given by words: it is a represented, named, narrated reality.
  Collective action now requires social, cultural, and moral legitimacy that ultimately rests on communication in a specific sense. The general interest no longer imposes itself by authority but by adhesion and approval. The intercomprehension of actors in public life, that is, the ability to make sense together, to bring into existence a speech that responds to other speeches, thus defines the new legitimacy of the norm. It weaves the conscious experience of a community and imposes itself as a prerequisite for the rebuilding of a con-sensus (common sense): "the norms and principles that regulate behavior must be elaborated based on exchanges and debates, so that action becomes interaction" (Monique Castillo et Romain Leroy-Castillo, La raison d’agir, Vrin, 2023, p. 210, not translated).
  
  As long as citizens are aware of participating in a world where meanings determine the reasons for decisions, and where they assume responsibility for the collective institution of meaning, one can hope to go beyond norms and elevate the debate to the values (or purposes) that underlie them. Are technical norms themselves, sometimes arid or even inconsistent, not in reality the technico-legal emanation of underlying values and principles? Often, these seemingly dry and forbidding norms pursue a purpose reflecting the fundamental values of the society that issues them: preserving ancestral know-how, ensuring the safety of our children, guaranteeing public health, preserving the world we leave to future generations, etc.
  
  It is ultimately a matter of collective meaning, value, and purpose. If the normative process meets so little acceptance, it is because it seems to have become the expression of an instrumental, calculating, "technocratic" rationality which has lost its inspiration, its purpose, its spirit. As if the accumulation of countless detailed norms had gradually transformed the natural distance between norms and values into an unbridgeable gap, into an irreparable rupture.
  
  To say (for the administrator) and read (for the administered) the norm in light of the symbolic, ethical, cultural purposes that motivate it could infuse into the normative process a spirit of concord as a union of wills, and open the way to the ideal of a normativity motivated not by technical rationality but by an ethical purpose, a normativity carrying a common future project where values and norms align once again. We can thus hope to find a balance between the need to preserve the diversity of citizens, while recognizing the place and role of norms in the construction of a community of shared meaning and values.

Romain Leroy-Castillo