Abstract
The public interest is at the center of political semantics: the term is ubiquitous, both in the discursive practices of public law and public administration and in the rhetorical and polemical discourses of public debate. Although it is a fundamental element of language, its content has rarely been defined: it is the way it has been used over time that helps to reveal its meaning, a meaning that, because it has not been explicitly declared, remains uncertain and may vary according to context, speakers, and interlocutors.The semantic difficulty lies in the almost oxymoronic contraction between the words ‘interest’ – which logically should refer to any individual – and ‘public’, which refers to unity, uniformity, and homogeneity. How can an objective content be derived from such a formulation? Can this content be precise and strong enough to serve as the basis for a political legitimacy to decide whether the implementation of a public policy is justified or not?So it is the epistemological status of the public interest that must be questioned: we need to determine what kind of epistemological object it is in order to understand what purpose it serves in discursive practices. In this article, we will develop the thesis that public interest is neither a scientific concept in the strict sense of the word, nor a category, nor even a pure political experience, but a political concept understood as a linguistic structure, a regulative fiction always in flux and elaborated historically in response to a rational anthropology. To this end, we will first demonstrate the lack of definition of the so-called concept of public interest. Second, we will explain its paradoxical persistence not only in political discourses, but also in theoretical discourses on politics, by looking back at the main stages of the genealogy of the concept. Finally, we will elaborate the difficulties associated with the epistemological qualification of the concept of “public interest” and suggest an interpretation of its status.
JEL Codes: B15, H10, K10.