State deception? Idk what to tag

Like Thomas Paine, this harmonizing process is intrinsically linked to the Christian faith, which he describes as the first of the civic institutions in the United States. The prevalence of this moral sense refers to a new “physiognomy of servitude”: democratic man “compares himself individually to all those around him” (, 1, II, 18). The dispersal of power and the intensification of the interplay of gazes are both carriers of a security logic that weighs on the mind of each individual. Thus, the Protestant tradition of self-government is based on a strong ethnic and cultural homogeneity, which encourages social conformity (). The weight of community institutions is presumed to diffuse “subtle coercions” throughout the social body, ensuring the automatic functioning of power within a diversity of environments. Thus, on the one hand, the development of small, lively and decentralized communities would limit the uniformizing pressure of democracy. On the other hand, community embeddness would be a vector for the circulation of moral values. Each individual is governed in their community, each community is governed by its community of communities, and so on. It is on the reasonability of the common individual that government action can be connected. As , 354–55) notes: “The common man is not infallible; far from it. But he perceives more readily than the specialist the bearing of public choices upon the pattern of values cherished by the community.” Federalism would thus be a cooperative order that allows for adjustment to the naturalness of social functioning ().

This narrative has had international influence since the 19th century. In France, the “political culture of generality” inherited from the Revolution shaped a state structure marked by centralization, as well as the negation of intermediate bodies and local identities (). Nevertheless, from the Restoration onward, the affirmation of liberal ideas was part of (re)forming the state (). In 1863, while commenting on Nancy's decentralization project, Jules Ferry insisted on the need to institute a self-government in France (). For the jurist and future minister, decentralization—which multiplies local procedures and interactions—had normalizing properties. It was through the dynamics of social control and learning that decentralization generates that local life limits moral discrepancies without upsetting social ones. The coercive specter of decentralized power is as much about officials, who dominate without excess, as it is about the working classes, who are forced to adopt a level of reasonability in their actions. The territorialisation of power is therefore consistent with a security logic. By preventing the risks of oppressive oligarchical management and destabilizing popular discontent, territorialisation nevertheless guarantees the maintenance of an unequal social order. This shows how the American federal myth is invested with a hegemonic function. As Ferry (, 114) argued:

Nothing is more appropriate than an active and powerful communal life to promote that fusion of classes which is the goal of democracy, to bring distances closer together, to attenuate by the unlimited accessibility of local functions, by the exercise of uncomplicated but honoured and important magistracies, the inequality of conditions, to make the rich more benevolent and the poor less bitter, to make penetrate into the deepest strata of the people, with the habits of intelligent and free grouping which public life engenders, the feeling of political reality and respect for the law.

The local community would thus be a vibrant place of embedded surveillance, where everyone is under the watch of their peers and where deviance can easily be reported and sanctioned (). According to a logic very close to the Panopticon, the communitarian, and then intercommunitarian, architecture of human relations would manage to dilute “subtle coercions” to the whole social body, without a government entity having to exercise a centralized control. This new mode of production of the State would be guaranteed by the diffusion of a religiosity that is both plural and secularizable—“a civic knowledge based on a civic religion” (, 217).