Democracy Past and Future

It was not long after democracy triumphed as a regime, in the post–cold war era, that the theory and practice of democracy fell into disarray. In the United States, as in the rest of the world, democracy has never been more prestigious, among intellectuals and policymakers, even as its practical implications for foreign policy have become disquieting and its institutional content at home has undergone massive shifts. The unanimity—left, right, and center—about the value and importance of democracy is remarkable, to be sure. But it occurs at the same time that it is hollowed out or even perverted, made—as many think—into a cunning apology for imperial advancement. Yet the disarray that garners most attention and inspires most debate in the field of foreign policy is far more general, and it is above all internal and theoretical.

The situation is especially serious for the left, liberal and progressive, on the defensive and out of power in the United States and throughout much of the rest of the world. But the loss of practical energy, which might have prompted theoretical introspection, has instead led to the embrace of superannuated approaches. For the moment, the effect of September 11, one confirmed rather than unsettled by the more recent electoral victory of conservative politicians, has been a revival of an old ideological couple. An antiterroristic or “antitotalitarian” liberalism has become the favored approach of many political elites in Western democracies, and in America not least, while hostility to liberalism in the name of radical democracy wins more and more converts everyday in the ranks of intellectuals and activists.

Among the numerous connections between the antitotalitarian liberalism and the dominant, populist alternative to it that present themselves today, one is their shared source in the practical and intellectual experience of a particular nation: France. The antitotalitarian perspective, of course, resonates in obvious ways with the historical anticommunism of a certain strand of American liberalism. But in the form in which it has recently been renovated for the post–September 11 world, most prominently but far from exclusively in Paul Berman’s war pamphlet Terror and Liberalism, the “fighting faith” of antitotalitarian liberalism is both negatively and positively inspired by French intellectual politics.¹ Berman, for instance, offers a narrative that paints contemporary “Muslim totalitarianism” against which the new liberalism is supposed to direct itself as the outcome of the disastrous and delusional politics of French modernism, one drunk on the fantasy of redemptive politics, that stretched from Saint-Just to Saddam Hussein, and from Charles Baudelaire to Osama bin Laden. But the remedy he offered likewise claimed inspiration from a rival tradition of French “antitotalitarianism,” emblematically associated with Albert Camus and, in the generational biography of the left, with the anti-Marxist insights of the “new philosophy” of the 1970s and since, a school of which Berman is the most influential American follower.²

The post–September 11 atmosphere makes antitotalitarian liberalism define itself above all, like rival doctrines, as a foreign policy doctrine. And it is there that it attracts most criticism. As the external campaign against enemies continues, as antitotalitarians make common cause with imperialists, the internal politics that might have distinguished them remains neither the focus of attention nor the subject of revision. In the meantime, the American invasion of Iraq—justified and supported in the breach in liberal antitotalitarianism’s rhetoric and with the support of many of its partisans—has increasingly looked to much of the world like an apology for the advancement of imperial power. Few observers have failed to notice this, and the implausibility of the antitotalitarian response to the real challenges of unilateral American action abroad and the effects of globalization everywhere have invited a response.

The frailties of the revival of the antitotalitarian vision when it has outlived its era explain why it makes little or no headway outside liberal elites, notably in the antiglobalization movement or in the academic world. Alas, the most popular alternative to it is a project even more archaic—and equally bound up with French history and thought—as the one it resists. Home of the true revolution, even if Karl Marx became its theorist, France’s quest for a fulfilled democracy that would overcome the limits of liberalism and capitalism in the name of all men and women still nourishes the dream of bringing the old regime of evil oppression crashing down. In fact, it is a surprise that historians will have some day to explain that after September 11, 2001, a confused mélange of revolutionary Marxism, academic postmodernism, and nationalist third-worldism came to dominate the hearts and minds of so many in the academy as the most plausible response to the blind spots of contemporary antitotalitarianism. In particular, Marxism—updated by more recent theories of total “biopolitical” control, under conditions in which the exception has become the norm—came to enjoy a second life.

For all its local critical insights, one thing unites this radical democratic and anti-imperial alternative with the antitotalitarian liberalism it abhors: a programmatic aphasia on the question of what it means to constitute and regulate a modern democracy. Both approaches, that is, are above all negative. The proposal of theorists advancing the synthesis of Marxism and postmodernism, lacking any plausible institutional program, has been to pray for a “multitude” to arise. What that entity would do, if it came on the scene, remains more hazy. In the academic world, however, the call has been heeded, faute de mieux. Prophesying resistance against an unlocalizable empire, with a programmatically empty appeal in the tradition of St. Francis to the poor and beset masses, “French theory” updated itself with a new political edge so that old fashions could continue their campus appeal. But St. Francis, even made into a democratic activist before his time, unfortunately had no institutional program.³

Though the contrast between the rival perspectives is superficially one of external politics, then, one should not fail to miss the internal programmatic emptiness of both dominant schools of thought. For antitotalitarianism, it is as if the main problem for liberal democracy were its enemies, conservatives at home and totalitarians abroad, as if the programmatic and institutional alternative to rival forces were simply obvious—as if, then, the contemporary disarray of democracy were not the sign of deep theoretical and practical perplexity about its content, as if there were no need to ponder the historical variations and untried possibilities of democracy. Externalizing the disarray to focus on democracy’s enemies, at times by fueling their creation, involves the concealment, rather than the consideration, of the problem. As for Marxism-postmodernism, it is as if the main barrier to instituting democracy were simply the evil reign of the imperial opposition. And so the approaches conspire in propagating the false belief that the problem of democracy was primarily one of identifying the proper enemy.

Beyond their historical origins, critical limitations, and programmatic hesitations, the two options, supposedly poles apart, are complicit, finally, in mutually maintaining a space of debate in which both can thrive: they strengthen one another, the existence of each making the other seem plausible in a way that neither would on its own. The triumph of antitotalitarian liberalism fuels the triumph of neo-Marxist populism, and vice versa. Rarely have defective positions more fully deserved one another. But though a catastrophe for the progressive cause, practical disempowerment and theoretical inadequacy define the most important challenge for political thought and life in the present day. The work of Pierre Rosanvallon, which this volume introduces, suggests that it is no trivialization to take this apparently wholly contemporary and post–September 11 alternative as the point of departure for responding to the challenge, because the alternative, seemingly new and up-to-date, is in fact very old.

Rosanvallon, a professor at the Collège de France, represents a perspective dispiritingly little known in the United States compared to the antitotalitarian new philosophy of the moment and the Marxist-postmodernist resistance in response—a perspective that allows one to see the contemporary debate as another act of a pathological rivalry that extends very far back in modernity, and is even constitutive of it. The alternatives are not simply to be dismissed as passing fancies or poor options, since they are consequences of a modernity in which everyone now shares. Rosanvallon’s proposal, indeed, is that only by rooting such recurrent dilemmas in their long history, and recognizing the duration of their compulsive repetition, can a potential way beyond them come into view.

Yet another French theorist, one finally worthy of prostration after the twilight of the old idols? It is true that Rosanvallon is in the first rank of contemporary European intellectuals and, in his own country, in a position at the institutional apex of intellectual life—as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu once were. The range of his work, written over a period of more than three decades, might justify such an attitude, too. And one might add that Rosanvallon offers an approach with the scope and depth of theories of democracy from comparatively betterknown figures like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls (both of whom Rosanvallon criticizes for having excessively normative approaches to democracy that do not sufficiently respect its historicity). But searching for premises for a new discussion rather than another humbling master is the point or the purpose of the selection of texts that follow. Rosanvallon’s work, indeed, is notable for its lack of hermetic obscurity and for a modesty often absent in theorists who invite discipleship rather than debate. Most of all, it presents an effort of thought that takes seriously the importance of the antitotalitarian perspective today—Rosanvallon’s career emerged out of that school—even as it suggests the need for a next step. It outlines, by considering the vicissitudes of democracy past, a way to begin thinking about democracy future.

Born in 1948, Rosanvallon is a member of the 1968 generation, and his democratic theory is tethered, from beginning to end, to the hopes for democratic revitalization—with democracy redefined not as a matter of party control of the state but reinvention of everyday life—of which his generation became the historical bearer. But unlike much of his generation, the brand of left-wing militancy in which he engaged committed him both to a highly continuous, and highly reflective, itinerary. Never a Trotskyist or a Maoist—the two most significant of the welter of allegiances for young leftists in the brief but spectacular period of gauchisme in the years after France’s May events—Rosanvallon joined a trade union called the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) as a house intellectual and spent his early career advancing and rethinking its particular brand of radicalism within the turbulent and fascinating battle for a plausible left-wing vision of the period.⁴

The CFDT had evolved from Christian syndicalism of the interwar years and became secular, noncommunist, and reformist in the postwar period (unlike its major competitor, the dominant and staunchly communist Confédération Générale du Travail). Thanks to its enterprising general secretary after 1968, Edmond Maire, the CFDT affiliated itself quite rapidly with one of the principal ideals of the student revolt, that of autogestion, or self-management. In its origins, the coinage referred to the autonomous organization of enterprise, but it quickly became a generalized term for what life in all sectors would look like after the refusal of hierarchy symbolized by the May 1968 events. The CFDT became the principal vehicle for the spread of the autogestionnaire ideal in French politics of the period, and Rosanvallon, in turn, became its principal theorist. He published his first book under his own name in 1976, in which he celebrated and attempted to refine it.⁵ Self-management meant the liberation of the forces and freedoms of civil society outside and against the state, though some of its partisans took their enthusiasm for it so far as to think that it portended the withering away of politics altogether. It stood for the condemnation of the bureaucratic state—whether Western or Eastern, capitalist or communist in its lineage—in the name of a revived civil society. (In fact, the celebrated concept of “civil society” returned in France in this socialist current that came to be called, retrospectively, the “second” or “other” left, shortly before East European dissidence would spread the concept globally.)

Though overly simple and institutionally vague, the self-management concept offered a partial programmatic translation of the aspirations of May 1968, placing traditional leftist egalitarian concerns within a much broader, and much more libertarian, framework. It augured a new definition for progressive politics that helped break the left’s historical ties to the communist Soviet Union and its conceptual basis in an outmoded vision of politics as state capture and control (through electoral means or not). The concept had to make its way, however, in a complicated struggle for what vision should claim the hearts and minds of French socialists, and it was together with a number of other intellectuals that Rosanvallon agitated in the Parti Socialiste for a cleavage between “two cultures of the left,” statism and self-organization, whose existence their standard-bearer Michel Rocard proclaimed in a famous speech, co-written by Rosanvallon, at the party’s July 1977 Nantes congress.⁶ Rocard, however, lost out to François Mitterrand as party leader. It was around this time that Rosanvallon turned his energies to scholarship, without ever losing his interest in day-to-day politics.

Following on the heels of the collapse of gauchisme and the decline of hopes for imminent social transformation, the critique of totalitarianism counted as the decisive intellectual event of the French 1970s. It is well known, of course, that the publication of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the early 1970s set off, in France far more spectacularly than in any other land, a fundamental rethinking of the nature of the Soviet Union and of the validity of any revolutionary enterprise. The versions of and sequels to the antitotalitarian moment have been various. But it stood above all for the lasting proposition that the left had to be reinvented in light of its twentieth-century failures. It demanded a left meaningfully chastened by the Soviet Union’s perversion of the quest for freedom into repressive tragedy. It put many intellectuals on guard against the persistent return of an archaic vision of progressive politics that has occurred, once again, today.

Along with François Furet, Claude Lefort—the central thinker of the antitotalitarian moment—became Rosanvallon’s major teacher and influence. (Both taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where Rosanvallon did his graduate work, and later became a professor.) Lefort’s philosophy, though difficult, is nonetheless the key theoretical basis and precedent for Rosanvallon’s work, and beyond much doubt the most lasting monument of the antitotalitarian era. According to Lefort, no societies are characterized by factual unity, but the source of division and conflict that characterizes all societies is not just of a factual or sociological nature. For there is also a necessary gap or difference between a society and its self-representation. And since the latter is a necessary part of the former (no society is possible without a self-representation split away from it), what Lefort called “symbolic division” is constitutive of society. The sources of this theory in French intellectual history are complex; but Lefort mobilized it to create a fascinating—and in the Anglo-American world undeservedly obscure—new classification for political regimes and their historical relation to one other, running from primitive societies without a state, through the democratic emancipation of civil society, and culminating in totalitarian statism.⁷

Democracy and totalitarianism are, according to Lefort, the key couplet of modern ideological history. Democracy, Lefort argued, is a disincorporated political form in multiple senses. It is organized around individuals rather than corporations, and it loses the monarchical, personally embodied, and partly exterior symbol of power that clearly organized society. Finally—and again in corporal terms—by dispensing with the king’s body, and thus by making the central site of power “empty,” in Lefort’s celebrated phrase, democracy also invited the temptation that society might finally dispense the exteriority that makes all polities possible, allowing it to become one with itself. The violence of totalitarianism, according to Lefort, flows from its attempt to make society in democracy forcibly coincide with its representation of itself as a collection of free and equal individuals—to transcend “formal democracy” in the name of a putative real democracy. In this sense, in Lefort’s conception, totalitarianism is possible only on the basis of, and as a kind of perverted attempt to realize, democratic aspirations. But Lefort’s refusal of this totalitarian aspiration did not mean falling back on some existing institutional repertory or on a conservative return to some prior defense of representative government. It did not, in other words, mean taking the opposition to totalitarianism as an end in itself, as occurred in the so-called “new philosophy” of the time and since. Instead, it meant the pursuit of democratic emancipation in better awareness of its potential ruin. “Democracy? It is a dream to suppose that we already know what it is, whether out of satisfaction with our present state or to attack its misery,” Lefort wrote in the 1970s. “It is simply a play of open possibilities, inaugurated in a past still close to us, and we have barely begun to explore it.”⁸

It was Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution that extended Lefort’s theory and provided one culmination of the antitotalitarian moment in French politics by rethinking the history of their nation in precisely such a spirit.⁹ For Furet, French history afforded the most illuminating materials for understanding the dynamics Lefort described. In an account owing much to Lefort, Furet painted the French revolution as giving rise to a voluntaristic drive to unify society according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the general will, to incarnate it institutionally, and to purify it of its sociological differences and its internal antitheses, in a bloody purgative ritual of terror that also bequeathed a highly problematic—indeed potentially criminal—legacy to the modern political imaginary. That such a campaign is unfulfillable did not make the fantasy of its completion any less alluring in its appeal to revolutionaries, or less disastrous in its political consequences. And not simply at the time: it made it the permanent temptation of progressive thought and action to achieve “real” democracy, unity at the price of pluralism, in a withering away of politics in the violent name of its realization. The idea of a politics that would begin by putting terror at the center of its concern—internalized in the French Revolution, externalized for the antitotalitarians of today—is given classic form in Furet’s work.

The philosophy of Lefort and the history of Furet laid the intellectual and professional foundations for their follower’s career as a student of democracy, encouraging Rosanvallon to face up to the task of envisioning the emergence and history of the sovereign people—including its perverted and pathological forms, beginning with the revolution. It was Furet too, among other things a great intellectual impresario, who initially conscripted Rosanvallon into a small coalition of senior intellectuals like Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis and younger thinkers like Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, and Bernard Manin, and later founded the Institut Raymond Aron, which has served as the institutional focus of “new French thought,” and whose successor center at the École des Hautes Études Rosanvallon has directed in recent years. (Furet and Rosanvallon also collaborated on the Fondation Saint-Simon, an important and influential think-tank of the 1980s and 1990s.)

Far from a homogeneous group of thinkers, however, this coterie, though united by an opposition to the totalitarian potential they saw in modern politics and an interest in the history of political thought and experience, lived through and applied the antitotalitarian moment in diverse ways. Above all, it is a mistake to interpret the antitotalitarian moment as a “liberal” moment in French intellectual history, even if some of the group’s members championed liberalism and all of them interested themselves in liberalism’s classical texts.¹⁰ Indeed, as the following selections rather graphically show, for Rosanvallon liberalism is also a central source of a dangerous utopianism in modern life that could also climax in totalitarianism. And yet it is undeniable that Rosanvallon came to be highly influenced by the new style of thinking about modern politics and French history that flowed out of the antitotalitarian moment. Among the earliest to join in and attempt to update it, Rosanvallon has spent most of his scholarly time since the 1970s engaged in a vast reconstruction of the history of democracy, of which this volume provides a basic and introductory overview.

In 2001, Rosanvallon received his appointment to the Collège de France, which marked a turning point in his career at the same time as more global ideological shifts were showing the limits of the antitotalitarian perspective which generated many of the lasting efforts that this volume showcases. For this reason alone, one would be making an enormous mistake to consider Rosanvallon’s work as simply another exercise in antitotalitarian history or philosophy, much less a stalwart and lucid defense of antitotalitarian liberalism deemed so relevant by many, in the United States not least, today. It is true that very little about his project is intelligible (even or especially when his writings venture into historically distant periods) if it is not kept in mind that the horizon of the inquiry remained for a long time how the ingredients of totalitarianism were assembled in modern history. But Rosanvallon’s work now stands for the proposition that antitotalitarianism, too, has limits, and is not the sole basis for theorizing and practicing democracy today, for conducting a foreign policy, or for conceptualizing one’s own society. This volume, accordingly, does not simply illustrate antitotalitarianism in its historical applications, but also intimates what plausibly might come after, or at least supplement, that commitment.

This selection begins with Rosanvallon’s reflections on methodology, texts of independent interest to theorists and historians in an era of fecund controversy about approaching political thought and its past chapters. In particular, the collection opens with Rosanvallon’s inaugural leçon at the Collège de France—his contribution to a now centuries’ old genre, bearing the marks of the oral ritual of induction that it performs, including its references to biographical influences and institutional predecessors. The usefully condensed and summary introduction to Rosanvallon’s approach provided there is balanced by a second and more detailed and formal set of methodological reflections in the following chapter.

Rosanvallon practices what he calls “the history of the political,” a venture that draws on the existing historical disciplines of political, social, and intellectual history, but with a new object that exhausts their methodologies as they have been developed over time. The political, as Rosanvallon defines it in Lefort’s footsteps, is in effect the foundation of society and the sole point of view from which its basic coherence comes into view. It is, very precisely, an approach in which the material reality (in the guise of the economy) that Marxist theory made the foundation of society is dislodged from that position. In the following writings, Rosanvallon explains his conception of the relationship between the study of this object and the inherited practices of political, social, and intellectual history. Its criticism of materialist and social history does not imply that the history of the political restores idealism to a long-lost but always deserved status of primacy. Nevertheless, and in spite of Rosanvallon’s criticism of intellectual history for artificially separating texts from society and insulating them in a canonical series, the history of the political requires a strong philosophical turn. As a result, the country from which the rival materialist approaches of the Annales school and Marxist historiography once flowed is now the source of a reinvigorated defense of the importance of philosophical interpretation and even of great texts as apertures on the political constitution of their ages. Rosanvallon’s methodological essays offer a useful point of entry into this recent development.

But the history of the political as Rosanvallon defends it goes beyond strict historiographical debate and demands more than a simple redefinition of the historical object. It likewise insists on the avowed search for contemporary relevance. Rosanvallon’s distinctive insistence on the overlap—indeed, identity—between political theory and historical study not only makes his work uniquely relevant to historians of the modern democratic experience, suggesting to them the price they pay for antipathy to philosophy. It also suggests the limitations of political theories that do not find a way between the equally unsatisfactory, if popular, methodologies represented by an antiquarianism that attempts to free the study of past theories from the pressure of contemporary questions and a presentism that dispenses with the burden of history in framing its inquiries. Both alternatives, Rosanvallon says, are objectionable.

The obvious comparative point of reference, in this regard, is the methodology of the Cambridge School, as epitomized in the theory and practice of Quentin Skinner. In his most famous methodological piece, now more than three decades old, Skinner recommended a kind of enforced antiquarianism to keep presentist commitments from interfering with the intelligibility of texts, gained by restoring them to their place and time.¹¹ For Skinner, the alternative seemed to be a supracontextual belief in a set of immemorial concepts, as pioneered in the “history of ideas” of Arthur Lovejoy, or else the antihistoricist premise of a continuity of fundamental human problems that Leo Strauss vigorously defended. Rosanvallon thinks Skinner’s concern about the autonomy of the past is justified, but that an antiquarian reaction in its name simply goes to the opposite, and equally implausible, extreme. If it is false to think that the true and deep questions are immune to change (philosophia perennis), then it is equally misleading to believe that their lability makes their study over the long term impossible.

None of the essays that follow, by themselves, fully illustrates the unique combination of political theory and historical study that Rosanvallon has attempted in his full-length works. The translation of one of those, however, roughly coincides with the publication of this collection, which has a different intent: to introduce through a proper selection of texts the main lines of Rosanvallon’s overall interpretation of modernity.¹² Rosanvallon’s methodology, then, is wholly independent of the work that he has made it perform, but it is to the latter that the core of the volume turns. Modernity, Rosanvallon says, is unified enough to chart long debates over “relatively constant” questions, even if historical experience leads them to shift in their details; and, above all, it is run through by the same decisive quandaries for it to give rise to sets of interrelated pathologies to which moderns are typically and continuously prone (76). The main thrust of Rosanvallon’s work has been in their identification.

The first of these pathologies is voluntarism, to which the second part of this collection is dedicated, and the analysis and condemnation of which Rosanvallon inherited from his teachers and has extended in his own studies. Its most evident theoretical source, of course, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political thought, and its founding practical institutionalization is the French Revolution and its legacy in modern history. The first of the selections in this section presents an example of Rosanvallon’s writing on the French revolutionary moment, and the essay that follows illustrates the resumption of the Jacobin drive for voluntaristic fusion and unity that the revolution sparked in the history of universal suffrage. If the reader keeps in mind that these selections are not simply historical vignettes but just as much critiques of archaic visions of revolutionary unity that continue to inspire the progressive imagination, then their theoretical interest is redoubled.

The second selection in this section is an extract from Rosanvallon’s longest and one of his most prominent academic studies, Le Sacre du citoyen (1992), a monumental history of universal suffrage. Comparison of its premises with more conventional histories of suffrage, however historically rich, suggests what makes the history of the political distinctive in practice.¹³ For Rosanvallon, universal suffrage is not a simple aim to be interpreted as merely a victory to be won against reactionary obstacles over time. Instead, the question is what rival functions its conquest played in the political imaginary. Universal suffrage in France, for a long time and notably in the spring of 1848, did not function, he says, to institutionalize a pluralistic and divided society and was not intended to work as a mechanism for managing its differences; instead, it resumed the Jacobin tradition, reviving its dream of popular fusion. The object of Rosanvallon’s study is itself striking in French intellectual history—in Rosanvallon’s youth Jean-Paul Sartre could dismiss elections as “pièges à cons” (roughly, for suckers)—but the key in Rosanvallon’s interpretation of the French history of suffrage is how long the vote figured in the political imaginary as the mechanism for the fusion of the people, so that formal democracy would simply make possible “real” democracy without responding to the challenge of representation. Such a fantasy, in Rosanvallon’s view, continued to nourish the potential for the revolutionary abrogation of the existing state of things.

Understanding Rosanvallon’s portrait of revolutionary voluntarism—the attempt to remake society into the unified and homogeneous whole that “we the people” are thought to be already—is all-important for grasping the intent of the balance of the collection. In the succeeding essays, Rosanvallon introduces his more proprietary concept of rationalism that has been, in his view, the chief ideological response to voluntaristic democracy in modern French history. Rationalism, as Rosanvallon portrays it, has deep taproots in the Enlightenment (notably in the physiocratic movement), but it was the postrevolutionary figure of François Guizot, above all, who revived it against the voluntaristic tradition that climaxed in the Terror and haunted modernity thereafter. Rosanvallon’s essay on Guizot serves to introduce some of main themes of his outstanding book on the subject, Le Moment Guizot (1985).

As Rosanvallon defines it, rationalism is the dream of an impersonal science of politics, available to an elite, that would preempt conflict, usually by transfer of authority to experts in management of the nation in its name. Guizot’s genius, according to Rosanvallon, was to renovate the rationalism he inherited in order to make it the philosophy of a new and democratic age. Rationalism, seen from the inside, is not simply a vitiation of democracy, always haunted by the specter of the real thing, but an interpretation of it responding to its frequent voluntarist entanglements. In particular, rationalism, which often empowers elites, is based on a theory of representation, highly controversial but philosophically serious in its articulation. It understands suffrage rights, for example, not according to the impulse of popular fusion but as the winnowing of transcendent reason from incarnated passion.

By contrast to voluntarism, then, rationalism offered a program to represent the people, avoiding the violence of the attempt to do so by means of voluntarism and unity. That virtue, of course, came linked to equally constitutive vices, like the empowerment of elites and the acceptance of hierarchy. For all the plausibility of his attempt to find a theory and practice of democracy that would avoid its terroristic potential, Guizot also ended up illustrating an equal and opposite pathology: liberalism against democracy. Rosanvallon places Guizot in his longer historical genealogy in the second essay in this section of the volume, and argues, in the best available summation of overall conception of French modernity, that voluntarism and rationalism are in effect the theories between which French history permanently has oscillated, its constitutive rival pathologies, their competition the sign of a failure to master the aporias of modern emancipation.¹⁴ Is it a mistake to see in the confrontation of radical democracy and antiterroristic liberalism a new version—except that it is no longer simply history—of an old and constant dilemma in modern political experience?

This is the place to acknowledge that, notably in his study of voluntarism and rationalism, Rosanvallon’s work is centered on France and French history and politics. Those interested or professionally concerned with French culture and history will find a novel reading of their materials in these chapters, but those with no particular connection to or expertise in events in France should not mistake the point of the focus. In the writings from the stage of his career just reviewed, the implicit and often explicit comparative reference is England (and the Anglo-American world more generally) (see esp. 111, 119–20, and chap. 6, passim). The implication to draw from this fact is not, however, that the study of national specificities implies the availability of a healthy model somewhere else, as if there were a healthy, normative modernity simply to contrast to a pathological, deviant one. It is not that France, born in terror or captive of rationalism, is to be compared negatively with other nations, havens of redeemed and realized democracy. Furet sometimes suggested as much; and one dimension of antitotalitarianism, indeed, is that it occasionally fell prey to a vice of thought indicting deviation from a usually imagined norm, reviving Alexis de Tocqueville’s suggestion to look abroad for the remedies to French maladies.¹⁵

There is no denying national particularity, either in history or Rosanvallon’s historiography. But taking voluntarism and rationalism—those pathologies covered so far—as wholly French diseases ignores the obvious fact that all of the pathologies Rosanvallon emphasizes are deeply bound up with modern American (and modern world) history, too, even if they have appeared in different forms and were mastered—if they were mastered at all—in different ways. Beneath the superficial continuity of its regime, American democracy, for example, is in the end not fundamentally different than French democracy, and indeed one could reconstruct its history along somewhat similar lines. Fusion of “the people” is no more foreign to American history or to its political imaginary than the rationalistic fantasy of a rule of wisdom or expertise is.¹⁶ As another product and laboratory of modernity, America is also the home of a drive for popular sovereignty as well as a country where various “mysterious sciences” to master it could exert serious appeal. If the history of French democracy thus presents a relative specificity (all historical formations are specific), the implication is not that some other history presents a safe harbor for democratic modernity adrift. And so it is much more interesting to regard these pathologies as the common fate of moderns.

In fact, it is Rosanvallon’s true and considered view that modernity as such—anywhere and everywhere—is the problem, and that study of France is, in certain respects, a privileged occasion for facing up to it. (More recently, other countries have served a similar purpose: he could write on the American presidential campaign of 2004, which he had an opportunity to witness up close, in the same diagnostic spirit.)¹⁷ So if it is undeniable that Rosanvallon’s investigations into the history of democracy are focused on France’s exceptional history, with its wild swings between will and reason, it is not because it illustrates a modernity to which there is an available existing alternative but because it illustrates modern options so vividly. The point is not that France is incomparable but that the study of its democratic experience is incomparably illuminating for those who care about democracy anywhere. “The problem now is not that of a ‘French exception,’ relative or absolute, that has to be mastered,” Rosanvallon remarks in his most recent book. “The problem everywhere is that of a crisis of politics and a debate on democracy.”¹⁸

For Anglo-American readers, then, the comparative singularity of focus even in the early essays is best understood as one that helps explain and advance beyond the dilemmas of their history, too, distant and recent, as well as the contemporary ideological situation, local and global, that pits a radical populism against a constrictive liberalism. Such a point is made forcefully if implicitly in the following section of this collection, which broadens Rosanvallon’s study of modern pathology beyond rationalism to liberalism more generally—an ideology evidently, in its various forms, quite central to the Anglo-American historical experience and contemporary world politics.

The section should come as a particular surprise to those who refer summarily to “contemporary French liberalism,” a category as intellectually bland as it is falsely homogeneous, for in these essays one finds a searching critique of economic liberalism, understood as the fantasy of an emancipated civil society that would harmonize interests or men. Of course, some diehard Marxists are unwilling to grant that the critique of liberalism might not automatically entail their doctrine, and they will see the search for alternatives to both only as a cunning or craven betrayal of the democratic impulse.¹⁹ But one of the most startling, in fact shocking, filiations Rosanvallon offers in this section involves Adam Smith and Karl Marx. They were far more similar than their votaries themselves have ever acknowledged, for both were theorists of (in Rosanvallon’s phrase) “the withering away of politics.” In the chapter on the market, Smith is interpreted, quite powerfully, as theorizing commercial interactions above all out of his reflection that the social contract model of mastering political conflict was failing so that some other agent of social integration had to be found. But, just as in the voluntaristic fusion Rousseau hoped the social contract would accomplish, Smith’s harmonizing market equally suppresses democratic conflict and is a promised alternative to it.

The implication, if Rosanvallon is right, is that the totalitarian extinction of politics has many sources, some of them still very much alive. Radicalizing Smith’s aspiration for a harmonious civil society unto itself, Marx purified and updated Smith’s conception, Rosanvallon contends in perhaps the most virtuoso chapter in the book, by transferring the ideal of harmonization from interests to men. The upsetting conclusion of this argument is that Marx’s thought, as an extension of liberalism, casts light on the imperatives that have driven it (and continue to do so). To the extent radical democracy today is driven by the dream of a wholly realized civil society, it turns out to be very much inspired by the same forces that have given rise to the empire of capital that it wants to overthrow.

Rosanvallon’s case may seem to leave open the status of other forms of liberalism, notably political liberalism. And one will notice, in fact, a transition in his thought, from a denial that a unified historical vision of liberalism is possible, to the affirmation that it is feasible after all (120, 155). His most recent reflections on the subject of political liberalism may prove especially provocative to Anglo-American readers. The section on rationalism makes clear that a liberalism of Guizot’s stripe—the response to willful sovereignty through submission to a putative external and objective reason—is a deeply flawed form of the doctrine understood as a politics. And while Rosanvallon believes that the human rights typically at the core of other forms of political liberalism are essential to democracy, thanks to their role in maintaining diversity and pluralism, the philosophy of political liberties, Rosanvallon says, remains surprisingly difficult to divorce from the pathologies of modernity. It is both necessary and intricate to free it from the threat of depoliticization that haunts modern times.

For civil society, allowed by liberal freedoms, is not simply the realm of pathology. Indeed, Rosanvallon’s most recent book, scheduled to appear in English shortly as The French Political Model, returns to this central topic of French and modern history as well as of his youthful itinerary. It is especially notable that the argument of the new book departs rather defiantly from the antitotalitarian framework that oriented many of Rosanvallon’s earlier studies. To be sure, that perspective’s fear of the predatory state emerged in the defense of civil society, and Rosanvallon does not turn a blind eye to the radically antipluralist effects of the Jacobin tradition in French history (beginning with the revolutionary ban on intermediary bodies and partial associations). The pathologies of modernity, while acting in the name of a redeemed and emancipated civil society, often involved its extinction in fact. Instead of stressing the statist and proto-totalitarian extinction of associational life in European life, however, Rosanvallon insists on its silent strength (notably, after 1884, thanks to the importance of trade unions). That argument, including his rejection of the “Tocquevillian vulgate” of associational frailty, involves a tacit revision of the perspective staked out in some of the earlier work. “There was little room within this framework for a pluralist democracy of interest,” he notes in his essay on the French interpretation of universal suffrage (112); but by the work on civil society, Rosanvallon has come to the view that the refusal of pluralism in France always counted more as an illusion of analysis than as the truth about reality on the ground.²⁰

Not surprisingly, Rosanvallon’s most recent book returns to narrate historically the agitation in the 1970s on behalf of the democratic significance of civil society that he lived through as a leader in his youth. If its space of freedoms has been among the major sites to enact the political, the place where conflict and dissensus have been practically lived out in allowing the connection of individuals through motley associations, it is nevertheless true that they rarely—before Rosanvallon’s own lifetime—won the right to doctrinal recognition and theoretical defense. The overall argument, while making French specificity more precise, also softens any absolute distinction between France and other modern societies, where the modern liberation of individuals, too, could give rise both to the final depoliticizing pathology presented in this section and the vibrancy of democratic association that best incarnates the political as Rosanvallon defines it. Rosanvallon’s work on civil society, then, both completes the trinity of pathology—voluntarism, rationalism, and liberalism—and identifies one of the chief historical lineaments of a democracy that would fight free of it.

As the name implies, antitotalitarianism works by negation. It pioneeringly warns that in modern emancipation—in the voluntarist and collective aspirations of democracy—lay the seeds of totalitarianism. Rosanvallon extended the train of thought by suggesting that in emancipation other dreams of harmony—liberalism and rationalism—could likewise take root. The potential limit of this approach, of course, is that a focus on emancipation’s aberrations might seriously underdescribe the diversity of democracy’s past incarnations and the variety of its future possibilities.²¹ In a word, antitotalitarianism does not tell anyone what to make democracy except by warning about what not to make it. This is so even if, as Rosanvallon argues, the perversions to which modernity is prone are outgrowths—even epitomizations—of its principles and not departures from them.

Approach by negation has been defended, famously, in theology. But democracy, unlike God, is possible to address constructively and positively. And it is plural, too, not singular or unique in its animating principles or incarnating institutions: the critique of its aberrant forms does nothing to distinguish between its non-aberrant ones and may distract from the urgent task of doing so. From the beginning, those subscribing to the antitotalitarian perspective may have relied too much on negation to guide them, as if selecting the right path were simply a matter of eliminating the dangerous ones. As time passed, it came to seem less and less clear whether any positive, programmatic politics could emerge from a style of thought that seemed mostly devoted to the withering critique of utopia, in both its most overt and violent and its less obvious and insidious forms.

But this basic, foundational problem with antitotalitarian politics, which has haunted it, for all its contributions, since its inception, is now joined by a more serious difficulty. It is as if, precisely when the limits of thinking about emancipation through analyzing its perverse and self-destructive forms became clearer and clearer, it became tempting to respond not by searching for a new framework but by extending the weakening doctrine to new ends. Its failure for internal purposes has corresponded, indeed, to its contemporary extension for external purposes. Is there any other way to understand the popularity of antitotalitarian rhetoric—in politics and intellectual life—after September 11?²²

But the fact is that such attempts to revive the antitotalitarian point of view have involved robbing the concept of whatever depth and plausibility it had, notably in the thought of Claude Lefort, who did the most, along with and after Hannah Arendt, to give it rigor and power in political theory. Most glaringly, of course, violence is an instrument for international terrorism, rather than an enacted regime in which terror becomes the law. For this and other reasons, it is very difficult to generate a plausible interpretation of international terror networks as perversions of emancipated modernity, as Lefort, like Arendt, did with Soviet communism. This is not to gainsay the existence of modernist elements in it (the ones Berman, for example, devotes his energies to emphasizing). But those elements are far from the full story.

Whatever the shape such an argument might take in developed form, the antitotalitarian consensus simply has not coalesced, as a matter of fact, around the new war on terror. “Iraq … has confirmed the end of the anti-totalitarian moment,” Rosanvallon wrote in July 2004:

There has been a strong temptation to see in al-Qaeda a new form of terrorism capable of reconstituting this old western front. But in Europe the anti-terrorist fight has not given rise, at least for the moment, to a political and intellectual front comparable to 1970s–1980s anti-totalitarianism; and the sharp differences between the successive adversaries (Soviet communism and al-Qaeda) make such an outcome unlikely.²³

The result of the faltering of antitotalitarianism, however, is not that voluntarism, rationalism, or liberalism, as Rosanvallon defines them, receives new intellectual credentials, though their theoretical and practical appeal remains as irresistible as ever. Instead, it prompts the recognition that antitotalitarianism does not provide a sufficient alternative to those pathologies.

Is it an accident that the end of the antitotalitarian moment coincides with the partial exhaustion of thinking about democracy chiefly through its perversions? In any case, far from remaining in his tracks, in recent years Rosanvallon has begun the attempt to turn his exploration of the political to new ends. No doubt the most pivotal lines in Rosanvallon’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, which deserve to be cited at length, are these:

The discovery of the limits of the political has thus essentially consisted, at least up to the present, in an exploration of the stormy zones and savage domains into which democracy could lead. This exploration of its abysses remains a privileged way to understand democracy…. And yet it is now pressing to note that we are today truly confronted with the inverse problem, with the attrition and no longer the exacerbation of the political. We live through the ordeal of an apparent dissolution or erasure: the feeling of a decline of sovereignty, the perception of a dissolution of the will, along with a parallel rise in the power of the law and the market. The frontiers of government and administration, of management and politics, are similarly becoming more vague. The diagnosis, no doubt, will have to be improved. But the key is to emphasize that it is now time to approach the political taking these gray zones as a point of departure, making sense of the weakened energies, the paralyzing drifts, and the silent fragmentations. (52)

The shift, one might say, corresponds to one from the margins of democracy to its core. Antitotalitarianism’s limit is that it concentrates on exorcising terror from modern politics. Even when it is used to approach democracy through negation, it can have the vice of externalizing one’s view and, as a rhetoric for identifying and banishing enemies, distracting from one’s own quandaries.

Rosanvallon’s current interest in the “attrition” of the political seems designed to keep this perversion of antitotalitarianism—its reconstruction as an externalizing doctrine for targeting others—from occurring. Beginning in the inaugural lecture and continuing in the last section of this volume, Rosanvallon announces his future explorations in democratic theory (and commends to Europe an experiment in democratic practice). One way to read this final section is as a promising and tantalizing attempt to turn toward a democratic theory that would leave behind the exclusive antitotalitarian orientation. And whatever their tentative and promissory status, Rosanvallon’s interventions are promising in relation to existing American debates.

Consider his notion of the pluralization of sovereignty, for example, which helps see a way past a typical American dilemma between the inviolability of popular rule and the importance of constitutional control by judges. A recent school of progressive jurisprudence has insisted, in a spate of works, on the contingency of constitutional judicial review and judicial supremacy in American history and demanded the return of sovereignty to “the people themselves.”²⁴ Traditional constitutionalists, in response, see the defense of popular sovereignty against judicial review (as one of them put it) as “taking the law out of constitutional law.”²⁵ Rosanvallon’s argument is evidently directed against European fears of constitutional control through judicial empowerment of any kind, but it is equally applicable to the contemporary American belief that judicial review has been taken too far. Still, Rosanvallon’s insight into the possibility of pluralized sovereignty, which would allow analysis to exit from the contemporary assumption in a zero-sum game, does not yet provide sufficient detail to know when institutional change under the banner of pluralization might abridge popular sovereignty (as Americans often worry) and when it might genuinely enhance it. Certainly both eventualities are possible. Similar observations apply to Rosanvallon’s imaginative call for the study of democracy’s temporalities, which also joins a budding American discussion, as well as the generalization of emancipation he outlines.²⁶

No one, then, should expect finished or immediately applicable answers from this collection, offered as it is in an introductory rather than conclusive mode. It offers an exploration of democracy of the kind for which Lefort once asked without leading to a definite program. This result, however, is not just a matter of a work in progress and a new turn in the making. In a way, the enlightened persistence of the questions is part of the point. Indeed, it is following Lefort that Rosanvallon insists, in some of the most eloquent passages in this book, that democracy is by definition adventurous and unfinished, and that the goal of reflection and action is not to achieve some mythical and utopian “realization” of democracy, but to further deepen its possibilities in full awareness of its insoluble quandaries.

In this way, the volume is intended to lead to the brink of a program. Defining the situation through conceptual reconstruction of its historical antecedents does not suffice, but it is a start. Caution before the threat of political disaster prompted by anti-totalitarianism, then, joined with a commitment to exploration of the open field of democracy. Patrolling the borders is not enough, for the difficulties are internal too. Such is the open spirit, abandoning the wish for final answers or total closure but also rejecting easy responses and the demonization of enemies, in which to read the essays of Pierre Rosanvallon that follow.

The texts in this book were selected and put in order by the author and editor of this volume together. The translators of chapters 2, 4, 6, and 10—whose names, where known, are recorded in the acknowledgments—deserve robust thanks. I translated the remaining essays and revised the others, in major or minor ways, to ensure accuracy and consistency throughout.

Whatever their origin, whether as independent articles or as prefaces to or parts of books, the titles have sometimes been changed in an attempt to give the volume overall coherence. In addition, the content of the texts have been altered, if only minutely, to allow each to be free-standing. Editorial additions, where deemed useful, have been added in brackets; existing English translations for cited French texts have been noted, cited, and used when easily available, and for texts cited from other languages English references have been substituted when possible.

Certain terms, most of them deriving from Claude Lefort’s political theory, have been translated in the same manner throughout. Le politique has been translated as “the political,” and its meaning is explained in the first chapter; mise en forme and mise en scène and their variants have been translated as “setup” and “staging” respectively. The notion of Le Peuple-Un or l’Un, which originates from Lefort’s interpretation of Étienne de la Boétie,²⁷ has been translated simply as “unified people” to avoid a jarring neologism. Finally, the translations preserve the term “institution” which Rosanvallon, following predecessors, uses often to signify a process—less conscious and instantaneous than foundation or revolution—by which human political collectivities come about. A selective bibliography of Rosanvallon’s writings, including English translations where they exist, is appended to the end of the selections.

The author and editor express their gratitude to Alisa Berger for her logistical assistance with the texts, Danielle Haase-Dubosc and the Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall for a wonderfully congenial work setting for pulling the materials together, Andrew Geoffrey Beres for help with the index, and Peter Dimock and his staff at Columbia University Press for their enthusiasm in making the volume possible and bringing it into being.