Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Power isn’t vanishing here; it’s mutating, swapping its old costume for a more modular wardrobe. Lyotard’s line has the cool, diagnostic precision of a philosopher watching the state get quietly outflanked. The “traditional political class” implies a recognizable villain: party machines, parliamentary elites, the familiar theater of elections and ideology. Then comes the pivot: power now resides in a “composite layer,” a phrase that makes governance sound like laminate flooring - engineered, durable, hard to pry up.

The intent is less to mourn democracy than to identify its updated operating system. Corporate leaders, administrators, and organizational heads don’t merely influence policy; they produce the categories through which policy becomes thinkable: what counts as “efficiency,” “growth,” “security,” “responsibility.” Lyotard’s subtext is that legitimacy has drifted from representation to performance metrics. Decisions justify themselves not by appeal to a shared political narrative, but by managerial competence and institutional consensus - the kind that travels well between boardrooms, ministries, unions, and bishops’ conferences.

Context matters: Lyotard is a central voice of postmodern skepticism toward grand stories that claim to unify a society (nation, class struggle, progress). In that vacuum, authority doesn’t disappear; it becomes networked. The most biting implication is how this composite layer dilutes accountability. When power is distributed across “major” organizations, everyone can plausibly claim they’re only one node in the system. Politics remains, but it’s increasingly conducted as coordination among credentialed stewards, not conflict among citizens. The modern elite, in Lyotard’s framing, isn’t a club. It’s an ecosystem.