Introduction
1. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York, 2002). For the prominent recent defense of “antitotalitarian liberalism” as the necessary response to the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004, see Peter Beinart, “A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism,” The New Republic, December 13, 2004, notably the last section, “Toward an Anti-totalitarian Liberalism.”
2. Scholarly databases suggest that the specific term “antitotalitarian” percolated occasionally in academic discussion in English throughout the postwar period, but with nothing like its current energy, while the coinage “antitotalitarianism” dates from the importation of the French discussion of the 1970s and 1980s. See Stanley Hoffmann, “Gaullism by Any Other Name,” Foreign Policy 57 (Winter 1984): 52. Thanks to Nils Gilman for this information and comments on my text.
3. The emblem of this school is, of course, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), and more recently by the same authors, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, 2004).
4. For a survey of gauchisme in the early 1970s, see Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68, l’héritage impossible (Paris, 1998), part II.
5. Pierre Rosanvallon, L’âge de l’autogestion, ou la politique au poste de commandement (Paris, 1976). On the CFDT, see Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, La deuxième gauche: Histoire intellectuelle et politique de la Confédération française démocratique du travail (Paris, 1982).
6. The speech is to be found in Michel Rocard, Parler vrai: Textes politiques (Paris, 1979). Cf. the longer theoretical defense of the position authored by Rosanvallon, together with Patrick Viveret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique (Paris, 1977). The periodical Faire was the basic organ of their position in the period.
7. I am preparing a historical study of Lefort’s political theory and its legacy in the thought of several intellectuals working today, Rosanvallon included. Lefort’s texts in English include The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) and Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis, 1988). See also now Bernard Flynn, The Political Philosophy of Claude Lefort (Evanston, 2005).
8. Lefort, Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1979), 28.
9. François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978), in English as Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981). On the antitotalitarian moment, the pioneering work is Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-totalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York, 2004). But it is potentially misleading to wholly reduce all antitotalitarian theory to intraparty polemics and to deny the potential relevance of its theoretical work beyond that dispute. All theories, generally applicable or not, lasting or not, have conditions of origin that that are local and temporary.
10. Cf. Mark Lilla, “Introduction: The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” in Lilla, ed., New French Thought: Political Philosophy (Princeton, 1994), and Martin Jay, “Lafayette’s Children: The Reception of French Liberalism in America,” in Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York, 2003). Rosanvallon’s work, and “new French thought” generally, have often been received in the United States in too close a spirit to antitotalitarian liberalism, which mistakes the diversity and indeed the central thrust of the turn to politics in French intellectual life since the 1970s.
11. The essay is now available in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), as ch. 4. Since that time Skinner has offered the nuance that the “thinking for oneself” that antiquarianism demands can involve consideration of “roads not taken” or “lost theories” that it is the historian’s task to recall to his contemporaries. But the normativity and engagement of the historian are still confronted with extreme anxiety. Skinner “wished, or was obliged,” Rosanvallon concludes, “to limit his role to that of a Cambridge professor,” foreclosing the prospect that the historian’s work can enjoy a communion with present quandaries and even contribute to their solution. Rosanvallon cited in Jeremy Jennings, “‘Le retour des émigrés’?: The Study of the History of Political Ideas in Contemporary France,” in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2002), 226–27.
12. See Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français: La société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, 2004), translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The French Political Model: Civil Society against Jacobinism since 1789 (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
13. It bears comparison, for example, with Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2001).
14. See also Rosanvallon’s entry on “Physiocrats” in Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
15. Indeed, to add to the flood of literature on contemporary French anti-Americanism, there is a book to be written on pro-Americanism, a fashion of the past few decades that often reposed on a startling ignorance of the history and realities of the United States, as if reading Tocqueville could serve as a proxy for such necessary learning.
16. On voluntarism against rationalism, it suffices to refer to the classic paper by Paul Kahn, “Reason and Will in the Origins of American Constitutionalism,” Yale Law Journal 98 (January 1989): 449–517, reprint in Kahn, Legitimacy and History: Self-Government in American Constitutional History (New Haven, 1992). Few practice the kind of conceptual history Rosanvallon recommends on American materials, but much more could be said on both voluntarism and rationalism in American history, for example the role of voluntarism in American populism or the power of rationalism in the history of American legal thought, including such recent chapters of its unfolding as the legal process in school and law and economics. Cf. Richard Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
17. He argued, for example, that negative campaigning in the American presidential elections implies “a more general movement of modern democracies…. It appears that now an era of mistrust in all democracies has insidiously arrived, with the minimization of irritation and the moderation of expectation becoming the new horizons of politics. The most important political question of the twenty-first century will be to know how this disenchantment can be surmounted without a simple return to past illusions. America is now the distorting mirror in which everyone must recognize the shape of his or her own weighty problems and subterranean developments.” Rosanvallon, “Les États-Unis et la démocratie négative,” Le Monde, September 30, 2004. See also Rosanvallon, “L’Amérique, entre renouveau militant et démocratie de marché,” Le Monde, October 14, 2004.
18. Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français, 434.
19. Cf. Perry Anderson. “Dégringolade,” London Review of Books, September 2, 2004, and “L’Union Sucrée,” London Review of Books, September 23, 2004, which have recently appeared in French as La pensée tiède: Un regard critique sur la culture française (Paris, 2005), with Pierre Nora’s critical response.
20. One may compare, on this point, the important scholarship about civil society offered by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Towards a Transnational View,” Journal of Modern History 75, no. 2 (June 2003): 269–99. The main conclusion is that Tocqueville’s pessimism about the vibrancy of civil society in Europe is contradicted by the facts. Indeed, Hoffmann goes so far as to argue that civil society flowered in so many rival directions—including illiberal ones—that the contemporary penchant of drawing a natural or necessary connection between associational vitality and democratic health is likewise seriously flawed.
21. This is the central theme of my own essay, written together with Andrew Jainchill, on Rosanvallon’s work considered as an attempt to revise Furet’s antitotalitarian classic. See Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, “French Democracy Between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 76, no. 1 (March 2004): 107–54.
22. “Like the fascists and totalitarians before them, these terrorists … try to impose their radical views through threats and violence,” George W. Bush began noting shortly after the events. Speech, November 6, 2001. It is to accept, rather than resist, the extension of such rhetoric to say that Bush’s own regime is an “inverted totalitarianism.” See Sheldon Wolin, “Inverted Totalitarianism,” The Nation, May 19, 2003.
23. Rosanvallon, “Europe in Perplexity,” http://www.opendemocracy.net (posted July 14, 2004). He explained: “Terrorism represents neither an innovative political and social form nor a new type of state regime. Terrorist action blends non-political behavior (nihilist destruction) and a culture of resentment; it ‘connects’ with the other in an insanely violent way, and is not bound to the formulation of any utopia or any project of self-construction.” On terror as a political form, see Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), part III and Lefort, Un homme en trop: Réflexions sur “L’Archipel du Goulag” (Paris, 1976), chap. 2.
24. Most prominently, see Mark Tushnet, Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts (Princeton, 1999) and Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York, 2004). On judicial empowerment as a global movement, see Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
25. Laurence Tribe, “The People’s Court” (review of Kramer, The People Themselves), New York Times Book Review, October 24, 2004, and their debate in New York Times Book Review, November 21, 2004.
26. Cf. Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government (New Haven, 2001).
27. See Lefort, “Le Contr’Un,” in Étienne de La Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire, ed. Miguel Abensour (Paris, 1976). The phrase “Le Contr’Un” figured as the subtitle of La Boétie’s sixteenth-century discourse, and Lefort used it to describe the fusion of the people in totalitarian ideology. It appears in Rosanvallon’s texts basically as a description as the desire for voluntaristic fusion in the French Revolution and in the tradition it bequeathed to modern history.
1. Inaugural Lecture
1. Roland Barthes, Chaire de sémiologie littéraire: Leçon inaugurale faite le vendredi 7 janvier 1977 (Paris, 1977), 6.
2. [This work, dating from 1913 and republished many times, exists in English as France, a Study in Nationality (New Haven, 1930). Siegfried (1875–1959) also wrote a number of studies on American and British politics.]
3. Edgar Quinet, Critique de la Révolution (1867), reprint in La Révolution, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1868), 1:11. [Cf. Rosanvallon, “‘Il faut refaire le bagage d’idées de la démocratie française,’” Le Monde, November 21, 2002.]
4. [The distinction is, in French, between le and la politique, masculine and feminine forms of the same noun, rendered here as “the political” and “politics” respectively.]
5. Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien (Paris, 1974), 47. [The translation is from The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York, 1964), 43.]
6. It is for precisely this reason that the historians of the Annales school were not interested in politics. It is also worth noting that it is on the same ground that Émile Durkheim did not believe that politics stricto sensu constituted a real object for sociology. “Wars, treaties, the intrigues of courts and assemblies, the actions of statesmen,” he wrote, “are combinations of events which always lack any resemblance to one another. They can only be narrated and, willy nilly, appear to flow from no definite law.” Durkheim, with Paul Fauconnet, “Sociologie et sciences sociales” (1903), in Durkheim, Textes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1975), 1:147, emphasis added. [The translation is from Durkheim, “Sociology and the Social Sciences,” in The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes, trans. W.D. Halls (New York, 1982), 196].
7. [The references are to Roberto Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies in Modern Democracies (1911), trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), and Moisei Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, trans. Frederick Clarke (New York, 1902), both in many subsequent editions. One large part of Ostrogorski’s work is devoted to American electoral politics.]
8. [He refers precisely to Michels and Ostrogorski. Early in his career, he published on both. See Rosanvallon, “Avancer avec Michels,” Faire 17 (March 1977): 31–34, and his reedition of Ostrogorski’s book listed in the bibliography this volume.]
9. Anne Fagot-Largeault, Leçon inaugurale faite le jeudi 1er mars 2001 (Paris, 2001), 29. The chair is in the philosophy of the biological and medical sciences.
10. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire, new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 185. [The translation is from The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 126.]
11. Ibid., 183 [in the English, 125].
12. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, in Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick, eds., The Thomas Paine Reader (New York, 1987), 203–4.
13. Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978),595.
14. Marquis de Condorcet, “Sur le sens du mot révolutionnaire,” Journal d’instruction sociale 1 (June 1, 1793): 10.
15. He added: “After having spread disturbance, incertitude, and ignorance everywhere, they added to the language a crowd of new words, with which they denominated those men whom they singled out, according to their whim, for the love or hatred of a misled people.” Edme Petit, speech of 28 Fructidor An II (September 14, 1794), Archives parlementaires, 1st series, 97:175.
16. Cf. Jacques-Pierre Brissot, “De quelques erreurs dans les idées et dans les mots relatifs à la Révolution française,” La Chronique du mois ou les Cahiers patriotiques 5 (March 1793).
17. Camille Desmoulins, Le Vieux Cordelier, no. 7, in Le Vieux Cordelier, ed. Pierre Pachet (Paris, 1987), 123.
18. [“L’histoire nous mord la nuque,” a Trotskyist phrase revived in the post-1968 period, suggesting that history had accelerated.]
19. Marcel Mauss, Œuvres, 3 vols. (Paris, 1969), 3:579.
20. Jules Michelet, Cours au Collège de France, vol. 1, 1838–1844 (Paris, 1995), 20.
2. Toward a Philosophical History of the Political
1. This contribution clarifies and develops the thoughts set out in Pierre Rosanvallon, “Pour une histoire conceptuelle du politique (note de travail),” Revue de synthèse, 107, 1–2 (1986): 93–105.
2. Rosanvallon, L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, 1990); Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris, 1992).
3. Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique (XIXe -XXe siècles) (Paris, 1986), 8. [In English, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis, 1988), 2.]
4. Aristotle, Politics, bk. 3, 1282b18–22. [In English, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941), 1192–93.]
5. Hannah Arendt, Qu’est-ce que la politique? (Paris, 1995), 31. [This text is available in English in Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2005).]
6. In the Middle Ages, “every private sphere has a political character or is a political sphere too.” [Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978), 22;cf. Rosanvallon’s discussion of this claim below, in chap.8, this volume.]
7. The term “political history” is preferred to “intellectual history” because the latter continues to have a very narrow sense in the Anglo-Saxon world, treating intellectual output and intellectual circles as distinguishable from other aspects of politics and society.
8. Jacques Julliard, Autonomie ouvrière: Études sur le syndicalisme d’action directe (Paris, 1988).
9. Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1984–6), cf. especially volume l, “La République” and volume II, book II, “La nation,” where politics occupies a very sizeable place. [Some of this material is in English as Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York, 1996–98) and Rethinking France: Les lieux de mémoire, trans. David P. Jordan et al. (Chicago, 2001–).]
10. André Burguière and Jacques Revel, eds., L’histoire de France (Paris, 1989–93).
11. Arendt, “Preface,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 1968), 14.
12. On this point I am following the excellent comments in the article by Philippe Raynaud in Raynaud and Stéphane Rials, eds., Dictionnaire de philosophie politique (Paris, 1996, 2003), s.v. “Philosophie politique” (here p. 561).
13. Alphonse Aulard, Histoire politique de la Révolution française: Origines et développement de la démocratie et de la république (Paris, 1901). The subtitle of Aulard’s book—“origins and development of democracy and the republic”—is in itself an illustration of this point of view.
14. Roger Chartier, “L’histoire aujourd’hui: des certitudes aux défis,” Raison présente 108 (1993): 45–56.
15. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1961); Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966). [In English, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965) and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970).]
16. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978).
17. Cf. in particular, as representatives of the text school, Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, who sum up their point of view well in their History of Political Philosophy (Chicago, 1963).
18. Cf. John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, 1962). For Austin, one recalls, language is an activity that accomplishes something; it is not just a passive operator of meaning.
19. There is a huge bibliography on the Anglo-American debate around Skinner that has not produced much in the way of a French echo. To appreciate it, two fundamental articles were J.G.A. Pocock, “The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry,” in Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd series (Oxford, 1962), 183-202 and Peter L. Janssen, “Political Thought as Traditionary Action: The Critical Response to Skinner and Pocock,” History and Theory 24, no. 2 (May 1985): 115-46. Of course, there are many other works.
3. Revolutionary Democracy
1. On the imagery of the people as Hercules, see the illuminating essay by James A. Leith, “Allégorie et symbole dans la Révolution française,” in Claudette Hould, ed., L’Image de la Révolution française (Quebec, 1989), 101–6. See too Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), chap. 3, “The Imagery of Radicalism.”
2. There are a number of interesting studies of these topics in Michel Vovelle, ed., Les Images de la Révolution française (Paris, 1988).
3. Cf., for example, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes, De Vinck Collection, No. 3623.
4. On this project, see Antoine de Baecque, “The Allegorical Image of France, 1750–1800: A Political Crisis of Representation,” in Representations 47 (Summer 1994): 114–43 and Judith Schlanger, “Le peuple au front gravé (1793),” in Jean Ehrard and Paul Viallaneix, eds., Les Fêtes de la Révolution: Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (Juin 1974) (Paris, 1977), 387–96. I am grateful to Antoine de Baecque who guided me in my search for information on David’s project.
5. Speech by David at the Convention, 17 Brumaire, Year II, recorded in Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, 32 vols. (Paris, 1850–1860), 18: 371.
6. See Charles Mazouer, “Le peuple dans les tragédies de Marie-Joseph Chénier,” Revue française d’histoire du livre 68–69 (1990).
7. Circular of 30 Pluviôse, Year VII, in Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, 29: 612–13. See also the order of 28 Pluviôse, Year VI, instituting the festival in ibid., 157–58.
8. See esp. Lamartine’s magazine Le Conseiller du peuple, 1848–1850, 3 vols. (Paris, 1850) as well as its supplement Le Passé, le Présent, l’Avenir de la République. Lamartine defines the democratic republic as “the unity of the people instead of the privileged separation of classes.”
9. Victor Hugo, Choses vues, ed. Herbert Juin, vol. 1, 1847–1848 (Paris, 1972), passim.
10. The idea of the people, Alain Pessin remarks, interests sociology, but in a particular sense, “not in order to search for a subject in the people, or to stage a dynamic of history born from its specification as a subject, but rather to see in it a sociability itself independent of all division and in spite of it, in order to see in it the social at the moment of its birth, the simple bonds of men, and the very nature of the collective life.” Pessin, Le Mythe du peuple et la société française du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1992), 114.
11. “The sovereign people is the universality of French citizens,” the Constitution of 1793 (Article 7) notes.
12. [The allusion is to Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).]
13. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, in its edition of 1786, likewise emphasized the polysemy of the term.
14. Speech of June 16, 1789, in Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, 1: 81.
15. Cited by Elisabeth Guibert-Sledziewski, “Le Peuple représenté,” Les Cahiers de Fontenay 24–5 (December 1981): 11–20.
16. On this point, see the numerous references in Louis Chevalier, Classes labourieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1958), and Pierre Michel, Un mythe romantique, les barbares (1785–1848) (Lyon, 1981). [The former work is available in English as Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York, 1973).]
17. Charles de Rémusat, “Des mœurs et du temps,” Le Globe, August 26, 1826;François Guizot, “De la démocratie dans les sociétés modernes,” Revue française, November 1837.
18. Hugo, Les Misérables, in Œuvres romanesques complètes (Paris, 1962), 733. [In English, Les Misérables, trans. Norman MacAfee (New York, 1987), 1051: “Sometimes the people counterfeits fidelity to itself. The mob is traitor to the people.”]
19. Jean-François Kervégan notes quite justifiably that political philosophy does not really know what to do with the notion of the people, “always tempted to demonize it or to idolize it.” See his entry in Philippe Raynaud and Stéphane Rials, eds., Dictionnaire de philosophie politique (Paris, 1996, 2003), s.v. “Peuple”(here p. 544).
20. Hugo, Les Misérables, 623 [in English, 719]. “The social observer,” he concludes, “should enter these shadows. They are part of his laboratory.” Ibid., 802 [in English, 1262].
21. Abbé Sieyès, Sur la question du veto royal (Paris, 1789), 15.
22. The expression is used at the Constituent Assembly on August 27, 1789, by Jean-Xavier Bureaux de Pauzy, during a discussion of the declaration of rights. M. Mavidal and É. Laurent, eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises, first series, 82 vols. (Paris, n.d.), 8: 492.
23. Joseph-Antoine Cérutti in 1791, cited in de Baecque, Le corps de l’histoire, métaphore et politique (1770–1800) (Paris, 1993), 123. [This book is available in English as The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford, 1997).]
24. Toussaint Guiraudet, Qu’est-ce que la nation? et qu’est-ce que la France? (Paris, 1789), 104. “The French nation,” he sums up, “is a society of about 25 million individuals…. The law only recognizes the great association, numbers heads and not classes, counting rather than weighing.” Ibid., 9–11. In a wonderful formula, Hugo noted, “Since ’89, the entire people has been expanding in the sublimated individual.” Hugo, Les Misérables, 714 [in English, 997].
25. Cited in Georges Bourgin, ed., Le Partage des biens communaux: Documents sur la préparation de la loi du 10 juin 1793 (Paris, 1908), 103.
26. I follow the distinction offered in de Baecque, Le corps de l’histoire.
27. On the problem of the division of territory, see Mona Ozouf, “La Révolution française et la perception de l’espace national: Fédération, fédéralisme, et stéréotypes régionaux,” in L’École de la France (Paris, 1984), 23–42 and Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier, La Formation des départements: La représentation du territoire français à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1989).
28. Sieyès, Observations sur le rapport du comité de constitution, concernant la nouvelle organisation de la France (Versailles, 1789), 2.
29. The notion of arithmetic of proportionality of the time also implies a purely mechanical relationship of individuals to the national territory.
30. Adrien Duquesnoy, speech of November 4, 1789, Archives parlementaires, 9: 671.
31. Sieyès wrote in this regard: “The natural consequence of this proposition is that the right to be represented belongs to citizens only in respect to what they have in common and not to what serves to differentiate them. Those assets and advantages that serve to differentiate citizens among themselves fall beyond the quality and character of citizenship.” Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état? (Paris, 1982), 88. [In English as What Is the Third Estate?, in Sieyès, Political Writings, trans. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 155.]
32. Sieyès papers, Archives nationales, 284 A.P. 5, folder 1 (sleeve 2).
33. Hence the difficulty of simply opposing “formal equality” and “real equality” as if the first were simply an incomplete version of the second. For on the contrary, there is an undeniable radicalism in the notion of formal equality in the sense that it affirms an essential equivalence among individuals. In a sense, it has a strong anthropological dimension, whereas the perspective of real equality is paradoxically much more limited and of a narrowly economic or social order.
34. On this point, see Mona Ozouf, L’Homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris, 1989) and Bronislaw Baczko, Lumières de l’utopie (Paris, 1978).
35. Révolutions de France et de Brabant 1, reprint in Œuvres de Camille Desmoulins, 2 vols. (Paris, 1874), 1: 218–19.
36. Archives nationales, 284 A.P. 5, folder 1(2).
37. Sieyès, “Sur le projet de décret pour l’établissement de l’instruction nationale,” Journal d’instruction sociale 5 (July 6, 1793, reprint Paris, 1981): 146.
38. Cited in Jacques Bouveresse, “De la société ouverte à la société concrète,” Pouvoirs locaux 25 (June 1995): 99.
39. Jacques Rancière rightly notes: “Politics exists as soon as a separate sphere of appearance for a popular subject comes into being, a subject whose essence is to be different from itself.” Rancière, La Mésentente (Paris, 1995), 125. [This work is in English as Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, 1998).]
40. To this extent, one might say, representation is grounded in a necessary fiction. The fiction is in effect a condition for the possibility of integrating the whole diversity of the social in the unity of the political body.
41. Article 35 of the Declaration of June 1793 reads: “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes, for the people and each of its parts, the most sacred and indispensable of duties.”
42. On this point, see Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II (Paris, 1958), 542–47. [This work is available in English as The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794, trans. Rémy Inglis Hall (Garden City, 1972).] In his Histoire de la langue française, Ferdinand Brunot signaled this elision too. Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, 13 vols. (Paris, 1905–32), 9:855.
43. Speech of October 10, 1793 (19 Vendémiaire, Year II). Already on August 28, Claude Basire noted, “The simple execution of constitutional laws, made for times of peace, would be powerless in the middle of the conspiracies that menace us.” Archives parlementaires, 73: 128. See on this point Olivier Jouanjan’s illuminating article, “La suspension de la Constitution de 1793,” Droits 17 (1993): 125–38.
44. D.A.F. Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir, in Œuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, 15 vols. (Paris, 1986), 3: 510. On this point, see the interesting commentary of Claude Lefort, “Sade: Le boudoir et la cité,” in Écrire: À l’épreuve du politique (Paris, 1992). [In English, “Sade: The Boudoir and the City,” in Writing: The Political Test, trans. David Ames Curtis (Raleigh, 2000), from which the Sade citation is also taken (80).]
45. The formula is due to Marc-Antoine Jullien, cited in Raymonde Monnier, L’Espace public démocratique: Essai sur l’opinion publique à Paris de la Révolution au Directoire (Paris, 1994), 235.
46. Cited in Lucien Jaume, Échec au libéralisme: Les Jacobins et l’État (Paris, 1990). On this notion of representation as incarnation in Jacobin thought, one will also find a number of excellent analyses in Jaume, Le Discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris, 1989).
47. Jacques Necker offered a very lively reproach of the “mysticism” of the Mountain in a text written in spring 1793: “They are always you, these representatives,” he wrote, “and you with a perfect exactitude. Their interest and their will are yours…. And it is always the word representative that allows such a blind confidence! The word promotes the idea of another self.” Necker, “Réflexions philosophiques sur l’égalité,” Œuvres complètes de M. Necker, 15 vols. (Paris, 1820–21), 10: 435.
48. François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978), 86. [In English, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981), 60, translation modified.] After Thermidor, one of the reproaches directed against Robespierre and his friends is precisely to have confounded their own representation of the people with the people themselves.
49. Cited in Patrice Gueniffey, “Les assemblées et la représentation,” in Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), chap. 13.
50. Session of June 15, 1793, Archives parlementaires, 66: 542.
51. Saint-Just, Discours sur la constitution de la France, reprint in Saint-Just, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1984), 423. [A long section of Rosanvallon’s La démocratie inachevée chronicles Condorcet’s attempt during the revolution to attain workable notions of representation and sovereignty.]
52. Speech of May 18, 1791, on whether deputies were eligible for reelection in Archives parlementaires, 26: 204.
53. It is a leitmotif of his interventions in 1793 and 1794. See, for instance, in his speech of May 10, 1793: “Begin with this incontestable maxim: that the people is good, and that its delegates are corruptible; that it is in the virtue and sovereignty of the people that one must search a safeguard against the vice and despotism of government. Archives parlementaires, 64: 430. On 8 Thermidor, Year II, the day before he fell, he spoke of the “representatives whose hearts are pure.”
54. See, again, the classic works of Ozouf and Baczko.
55. Report to the National Convention on the theory of democratic government, session of 1 Floréal, Year II, Archives parlementaires, 89: 95. Gueniffey notes very suggestively that one may speak in regards to the Convention “of the representation of a people that does not yet exist, against the people that does exist.” Gueniffey, “Les assemblées et la représentation,” 252.
56. Billaud-Varenne, in Archives parlementaires, 89:99.
57. Werner Hofmann rightly emphasizes that Delacroix succeeds in this painting in offering “a harmonious imbrication of icon and narration,” with “a singular composite of realism and the ideal.” Hofmann, Une époque en rupture, 1750–1850 (Paris, 1995), 605. The vision of the people in 1830 that emerges from it constrasts singularly with that of the people, a menacing and undifferentiated mob given to revolutionary riots, that Delacroix staged in his 1831 painting, Boissy d’Anglas (les émeutes du 20 mai 1795). For an interesting commentary that compares these two works, see Michel Le Bris, Journal du romantisme (Geneva, 1981), 147–49.
58. Hugo, Les Misérables, 657 [in English, 821–22].
59. Victor Lefranc, “Le suffrage universel en action,” Almanach de la République française pour 1849 (Paris, 1849), 183.
4. The Republic of Universal Suffrage
1. Cited by William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), 198.
2. Cited by Iouda Tchernoff, Le Parti républicain sous la monarchie de juillet: Formation et évolution de la doctrine républicaine (Paris, 1901), 203.
3. Achille Roche, Manuel du prolétaire (Moulins, 1833), 3.
4. Cited from a report on a democratic banquet, Journal du peuple, July 5, 1840.
5. This includes the important study of Sieyès by Chapuys-Montlaville.
6. Albert Laponneraye, Lettre aux prolétaires (Saint-Pélagie Prison, February 1, 1833), 2. Cormenin used the same language: “Universal suffrage,” he wrote, “therein lies the entirety of the republic. There will no longer be plurality, sinecures, civil lists, fat salaries, nor pensions … the budget of expenditures will be reduced to the strictly necessary.” Cormenin, Les trois dialogues de maître Pierre (Paris: Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera, 1833), 15.
7. Martin Bernard, “Sur les moyens de faire descendre la République dans l’atelier,” Revue républicaine 3 (1834): 296 and 5 (1835): 62, 65
8. See the highly representative pamphlet by Constantin Pecqueur, Réforme électorale: Appel au peuple à propos du rejet de la petition des 240 mille (Paris, 1840).
9. 8th ed. (Paris, 1846). Cf. his Avis au contribuable of 1842.
10. Speech of November 30, 1847, in Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Discours politiques et écrits divers, 2 vols. (Paris, 1879), 1:342.
11. Journal du peuple, July 11, 1841.
12. Stendhal, Mémories d’un touriste (Bordeaux, 1837). For his part, Lamartine said that one might poison a glass of water, but not a river.
13. Laponneraye, Lettre aux prolétaires, 4: “Under the monarchy,” he writes, “there are enormous salaries, and still greater expenditures; there is a dilapidation of the state’s funds. Under the republic, salaries are proportionate to the absolute necessities of officials, expenditures are limited, public funds are wisely allocated, because the nation itself overseas the allocation.”
14. Cf. their speeches of February 24, 1878, reproduced in Ledru-Rollin, Discours politiques et écrits divers, 2:577-602.
15. Cf. on this point the information provided by Paul Bastid, Un juriste pamphlétaire, Cormenin précurseur et constituant de 1848 (Paris, 1948), and the account by Garnier-Pagès in his Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, illustrated edition, 10 vols. (Paris, n.d.), 2: 2–4. See also the recent analysis by Alain Garrigou, “Le brouillon du suffrage universel: Archéologie du décret du 5 mars 1848,” Genèses 6 (December 1991): 161–78.
16. On April 3, 1848, the Academy of Sciences received a report by Augustin Cauchy on the means, proposed by authors of various memoirs, of solving the difficulties presented by counting and registering votes under the new electoral system. Having stressed the technical difficulties, the report noted laconically: “Must we conclude that it is impossible to provide the electoral procedure with the mathematical certainty that is important to all important operations?… We think not.” Comptes-rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 26 (1848): 400.
17. There are many echoes of the reception of universal suffrage in the local monographs devoted to 1848. Among the mass of such monographs consulted on this question, the following stand out: Maurice Agulhon, La République au village, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1979); Albert Charles, La Révolution de 1848 et la Seconde République à Bordeaux et dans le département de la Gironde (Bordeaux, 1945); J. Dagnan, Le Gers sous la Second République: La Réaction conservatrice, 2 vols. (Auch, 1928–29); François Dutacq, Histoire politique de Lyon pendant la Révolution de 1848 (25 février-15 juillet) (Paris, 1910); Jacques Godechot et al., La Révolution de 1848 à Toulouse et dans la Haute-Garonne (Toulouse, 1948); René Lacour, La Révolution de 1848 dans le Beaujolais et la campagne lyonnaise, 3 vols. (Lyon, 1954–55); G. Rocal, 1848 en Dordogne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1934); F. Rude et al., eds., La Révolution de 1848 dans le département de l’Isère (Grenoble, 1949); Philippe Vigier, La Seconde République dans la région alpine, étude politique et sociale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1963), and La Vie quotidienne en province et à Paris pendant les journèes de 1848 (Paris 1982).
18. Bulletin de la République 4 (March 19, 1848). For his part, Flaubert wrote in L’Education sentimentale: “First slavery had been abolished and now the proletariat! After the Age of Hatred, the Age of Love would begin!” (Paris, 1978), 331. [In English, Flaubert, A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man, trans. Douglas Parmee (New York, 2000), 333.]
19. Bulletin de la République 9 (March 30, 1848).
20. With the exception of a brief synthesis: Gabriel Vauthier, “Cérémonies et fêtes nationales sous la Seconde République,” La Révolution de 1848 18, 88 (June–August 1921): 51–63. [Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).]
21. Reported by Lacour, La Révolution de 1848 dans le Beaujolais, 2: 36.
22. Reported by Vigier, La Seconde République dans la région alpine, 1: 199
23. Bulletin de la République 19 (April 22, 1848).
24. Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 2 vols. (Paris, 1849), 2: 346.
25. In addition to the monographs already cited, see also “Les Elections à la Constituante de 1848 dans le Loiret,” La Révolution de 1848 2 (1905–6) and Philippe Vigier and G. Argenton, “Les Elections dans l’Isère sous la Seconde République,” in Rude et al., La Révolution de 1848 dans le département de l’Isère.
26. Cf. for example the testimony assembled by Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, La Révolution parisienne de 1848 vue par les Américains (Paris, 1984) and the memoirs of the marquis of Normandy, at the time ambassador of Great Britain, Une année de révolution, d’aprés un journal tenu à Paris en 1848, 2 vols. (Paris, 1858).
27. Bulletin de la République 20 (April 25, 1848).
28. 6,867,072 voters out of 8,220,664 registered.
29. Charles de Coux, “Du cens électoral dans l’intérêt des classes ouvrières,” L’Avenir, April 6, 1831. De Coux was one of the founders of Christian political economy.
30. Published under the title Réforme électorale, municipale, départementale et communale (Paris, 1840), 39.
31. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, 49 vols. (New York, 1975–), 10:45–146, at 58. [Marx’s quotation from Lamartine is from his speech before the Chamber of Deputies of February 24.]
32. Marx, “The Association for Administrative Reform,” Neue Oder Zeitung, June 8, 1855, in ibid., 14: 243.
33. On the meaning of elections in such countries, see Guy Hermet, Alain Rouquié, and Juan Linz, Des élections pas comme les autres (Paris, 1978) and Roland Lomme, “Le Rôle des élections en Europe de l’Est,” Problèmes politiques et sociaux 596 (1988).
34. After 1849, elections opposed two parties with very distinct programs.
35. On this critical point, see the synthesis of Pierre Pierrard, 1848 … Les pauvres, l’Évangile et la révolution (Paris, 1977); also Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton, 1984), and his article, “A New Religion of the Left: Christianity and Social Radicalism in France, 1815–1848,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 3, The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789–1848 (Oxford, 1989), chap. 29.
5. François Guizot and the Sovereignty of Reason
1. [The Ideologues were a philosophical and political school of the era of the turn of the nineteenth century, whose name gave rise to the generic concept of ideology.]
2. [So Guizot advised those who desired the vote under a regime of limited suffrage based on property and capacity. Rather than changing the legal hurdle, those who wanted the vote should, he said, simply surmount it.]
3. [The first line of the Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.” Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978), 473).]
4. François Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, 8 vols. (Paris, 1858), 1: 157–59. [There is an English translation of this work: Memoirs to Illustrate the History of My Time, 8 vols., trans. J.W. Cole (1858; reprint, New York, 1974).]
5. In Le Globe, November 25, 1826, introducing an article by Guizot, “On Sovereignty” [a portion of the longer study which Rosanvallon’s remarks prefaced]. Cf. Maurice Barbé, Étude historique des idées sur la souveraineté en France de 1815 à 1848 (Paris, 1904).
6. Guizot, Du gouvernement de la France depuis la Restauration et du ministère actuel (Paris, 1820), 201.
7. Cf. Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique, chap 1, in which he vigorously criticizes those whose “wrath has been directed against the holders of the power rather than against the power itself. Instead of destroying it, they have simply thought of replacing it.” Constant, Œuvres, ed. Alfred Roulin (Paris, 1957, 1978), 1070. [In English in Constant, Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988), 176.] Cf. Marcel Gauchet’s commentary in his edition: Gauchet, “Benjamin Constant, l’illusion lucide du libéralisme,” in Constant, De la liberté des modernes, ed. Gauchet (Paris, 1980) [since reprinted as the introduction in Constant, Écrits politiques, ed. Gauchet (Paris, 1997)].
8. Cf. Constant: “Sovereignty has only a limited and relative existence. At the point where independence and individual existence begin, the jurisdiction of sovereignty ends. If society oversteps this line, it is as guilty as the despot who has, as his only title, his exterminating sword.” Ibid., 1071. [In English, Constant, Political Writings, 177.]
9. Guizot, “Philosophie politique: De la souveraineté,” chap. 18, in Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, 363, 367.
10. Guizot, Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif, 2 vols. (Paris, 1851), 1: 120. [In English, Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government, ed. Aurelian Craiutu, trans. Andrew R. Scoble (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), 294–95.]
11. Guizot, “Élections” (1826), in Discours académiques (Paris, 1861), 406.
12. Guizot, Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif, 1: 98 [in English, 55].
13. Ibid., 2: 150 [in English, 295–96].
6. Political Rationalism and Democracy in France
1. Guilliame-François Le Trosne, De l’ordre social (Paris, 1777), 23.
2. “Maximes du Docteur Quesnay,” in Eugène Daire, ed., Physiocrates: Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours, Mercier de la Rivière, l’abbé Baudeau, le Trosne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1946), 1:390.
3. Cf. Louis-Philippe May, Le Mercier de la Rivière (1719–1801): Aux origines de la science économique (Paris, 1975), and J. M. Cotteret, “Essai critique sur les idées de Le Mercier de la Rivière” (law thesis, Paris, 1960).
4. P.P.F.J.H. Le Mercier de la Rivière, De l’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (1767; reprint, Paris, 1910), 82–85.
5. Ibid., 345.
6. On this point, see Akiteru Kubota, “Quesnay disciple de Malebranche,” in François Quesnay et la physiocratie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1958), 1: 169–96. See also May, “Descartes et les physiocrates,” Revue de synthèse 68 (July–December 1950): 7–38.
7. Le Mercier de la Rivière, De l’ordre naturel, 346. One must also bear in mind that Quesnay was the editor of the article on “Evidence” in the Encyclopédie, where he gave the following definition of the term: “The term evidence signifies a certitude so clear and manifest by itself that the mind cannot deny it.”
8. “There are two kinds of certainty: Faith and evidence. Faith teaches us truths that cannot be known by the light of reason. Evidence is confined to natural knowledge.” Ibid.
9. Letter to Damilaville, June 5, 1767, in Denis Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Georges Roth and Jean Varloot, 16 vols (Paris, 1955–70), 7: 75. “I do not believe,” Diderot added, “that it ever occurred to anyone but him, that evidence was the sole force counterpoised against tyranny.” Ibid., 76. Diderot did not hesitate to describe Mercier as a “new Solon.”
10. On this point, see Philippe Raynaud’s sound observations in “The Declaration of the Rights of Man,” in Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), chap. 8.
11. Marquis de Voyer-Argenson, Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France (Amsterdam, 1764), 142.
12. Cf. Denis Richet, “Autour des origines idéologiques lointaines de la Révolution française: élites et despotisme,” Annales E.S.C. 24, 1 (January–February 1969): 1–23.
13. Baron d’Holbach, Politique naturelle au discours sur les vrais principes du gouvernement (Paris, 1773), as cited in ibid., 20. On this point, see also the analyses of Edgar Faure, who correctly describes the “precarious contract” between a “mass without mandated representatives” (the French) and “a representation without mandate” (the parlements) in Faure, La disgrâce de Turgot (Paris, 1961).
14. Cf. Bernard Manin’s entry in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française (Paris, 1988), s.v. “Montesquieu” [in English as Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)]. See also Marcel Dorigny, ed., Montesquieu dans la Révolution française, 4 vols. (Paris, 1990), an excellent collection of texts on Montesquieu from between 1785 and 1814.
15. Cf. Gabriel Bonno, La Constitution britannique devant l’opinion française, de Montesquieu à Bonaparte (Paris, 1932).
16. A.-R.-L. Turgot, Œuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, ed. Gustave Schelle, 5 vols. (Paris, 1913–23), 5: 536. [An edition of Turgot’s letter appeared in Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the Means of Making It a Benefit to the World: To which Is Added, a Letter from M. Turgot… (London, 1785).]
17. See [John Stevens, often attributed to Richard Livingston, Observations on the Government, including some Animadversions on Mr. Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America; and of Mr. De Lolme’s Constitution of England, by a Farmer of the United States (1787),] a work translated by the Marquis de Condorcet and Dupont de Nemours as Examen du gouvernement d’Angleterre, comparé aux Constitutions des États-Unis, où l’on réfute quelques assertions d’un ouvrage de M. Adams, intitulé “Apologie des Constitutions des États-Unis d’Amérique,” et dans celui de M. de Lolme intitulé “De la Constitution de l’Angleterre,” par un cultivateur de New Jersey” (London, 1789). In this pamphlet, Stevens/Livingston responded to Adams’s work, itself a response to Turgot’s letter challenging Price. Taken together, this set of texts constitutes the heart of the debate between French political rationalism and the Anglo-American vision. To be entirely thorough, Gabriel de Mably’s Observations sur le gouvernement et la loi des Etats-Unis d’Amérique (Paris, 1791) should be added. A correspondence with Adams in which Mably denounces the mercantilist slide of the American republic, it is one of the first classic expressions of the critique of America.
18. Examen du gouvernment d’Angleterre, 76.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 177.
21. Quesnay, Œuvres économiques et philosophiques, ed. Auguste Oncken (Frankfurt, 1888), 646; and Baudeau’s interesting chapter “De l’Instruction économique et de son efficacité,” in his Première introduction à la philosophie économique (1771, reprint, Paris, 1910), 136–63.
22. Le Mercier de la Rivière, De l’instruction publique ou considérations morales sur la nécessité, la nature, et la source de cette instruction (Stockholm, 1775), 13.
23. Ibid., 34.
24. Dominique-Joseph Garat, Mémoires historiques sur la XVIIIe siècle et sur M. Suard, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1929), 2: 94. Note that in the mid-twentieth century Action Française thought it worthwhile to “rehabilitate” the physiocratic critique of the theory of representative government. See the important work by Pierre Teyssendier de la Serve, Mably et les physiocrates (Paris, 1911).
25. Louis Sebastien Mercier, L’an 2440, rêve s’il en fût jamais, 3 vols. (Paris, 1787), 2: 61. [This work exists in English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (1772; reprint, New York, 1974)].
26. Abbé Sieyès, Essai sur les privilèges in Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État? (Paris, 1982), 9. [In English in Sieyès, Political Writings, trans. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 76].
27. Ibid., 89 [in English in Sieyès, Political Writings, 157].
28. On this point, see the classic work of Patrice Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (Oxford, 1981), as well as Antoine de Baecque, “Le discours anti-noble (1787–1792): Aux origines du slogan: le people contre le gros,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 36, 1 (January–March 1989): 3–28.
29. Jean-Baptiste Salaville, L’organisation d’un État monarchique, ou Considérations sur les vices de la monarchie française (1789), cited in Jean-Jacques Tatin-Gourier, Le Contrat social en question: Échos et interprétations du “Contrat social” de 1762 à la Révolution (Lille, 1989), 117.
30. La Sentinelle du peuple 1, cited in Tatin-Gourier, 119.
31. The formulation is from Sièyes, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers État, 88 [in the English, 155].
32. Ibid., 90 [in the English, 158].
33. It was the system of vote by assembly that would prevail during the French Revolution. See Patrice Gueniffey, Le Nombre et la Raison: La Révolution française et les élections (Paris, 1993).
34. On this point, I take the liberty of referring readers to my book Le Moment Guizot (Paris, 1985).
7. The Market, Liberalism, and Anti-liberalism
1. Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York, 1979), 13–14, as cited in J.-P. Dupuy, “La main invisible et l’indétermination de la totalisation sociale,” Cahiers du CREA 1 (October 1982): 35
2. Hence all of the debates of the mid-1970s on the relationship of liberalism and autogestion; on this point, see my book L’âge de l’autogestion (Paris, 1976).
3. Pierre Manent, “Situations du libéralisme,” in Manent, ed., Les libéraux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1986, 2001), 26.
4. Only the complex relation of Marxism to moral liberalism might qualify as an exception to this generalization (communist regimes, however, were rigorously anti-liberal, in general, in the moral domain).
5. This divergence follows from the fact that political divides are organized in the United States around questions of rights and morality, while in France the question of the market is more central. But it is striking to see how in France an issue like that of Pacte civile de solidarité (PACS), as in the debates of fall 1998, can make the critique of liberalism more complex and help shift its definition. [The PACS is a French civil union provision, available since 1999, accorded to both heterosexual and homosexual couples, and some attacks on it were analogous to opposition to similar proposals in the United States, especially after the Massachussetts Supreme Judicial Court decision of November 2003 allowing same-sex marriage.]
6. I disagree, therefore, with Mark Lilla, who in an otherwise quite stimulating article understands one of the contradictions I have just mentioned as a simple incoherence, calling upon economic liberals of the 1980s to accept the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and, conversely, demanding that defenders of the cultural turn of the 1960s adopt the Reagan revolution. The liberal revolution must, in his eyes, be unified. See Lilla, “A Tale of Two Reactions,” New York Review of Books, May 14, 1998.
8. Marx and Civil Society
1. The latter is cited only once in Capital and then only to take relish at the fear that Smith inspired in the conventional public of his time, who accused him of spreading atheism.
2. [There are chapters on Hegel and Godwin, along with Thomas Paine, in the work of which this chapter forms a part. The general argument is that as theorists of civil society Godwin and Paine translated into political theory the dream of interest harmonization outside the state that Smith pioneered in economics.]
3. [Karl Marx’s writings are cited parenthetically as “MER” from Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978) where possible, and as “CW” from Marx-Engels Collected Works, 49 vols. (New York, 1975–) where not.]
4. This analysis is better directed against a “clientelistic state” than against the modern state. On this question see the analysis of the withering away of the state in my book, written together with Patrick Viveret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique (Paris, 1977), 48–50.
5. It is well known that it was only thanks to this premise, already illuminated by Smith, that Marx could develop his whole theory of surplus value.
6. [This section is undoubtedly a response to the Marxism, popular in the 1970s when this work first appeared, of Louis Althusser, who claimed to have discovered an “epistemological rupture” in Marx’s career between his early, humanist works and his later, scientific period.]
7. [See CW, 1:224–63.]
8. On this point, I have been strongly stimulated by Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago, 1977), and Michel Henry, Marx, vol. 2, Une philosophie de l’économie (Paris, 1976). [The distinction between holism and individualism, for its part, is from Dumont’s earlier work Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (1966), rev. ed., trans. Mark Sainsbury et al. (Chicago, 1980).]
9. [The term refers to heroic acts of individual initiative, along the lines of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Rosanvallon is referring to the following passage in Marx’s Grundrisse: “The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of eighteenth-century Robinsonades (which were) the anticipation of bourgeois society” (MER, 222).]
10. Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London, 1976).
11. See chap. 3 [of Le capitalisme utopique, on new forms of commerce and the reconceptualization of civil society as a market].
12. The fact that Marx uniformly uses the latter term makes translation difficult, since he sometimes means the “true” society and sometimes bourgeois society. [In English, too, it is possible to translate bürgerliche Gesellschaft both as civil society and bourgeois society; the English translations used here have sometimes been altered to correspond to Rosanvallon’s translation.]
13. In the “substantive” sense of the term, to use Karl Polanyi’s distinction, i.e., the economy as the science of the production and distribution of wealth under conditions of scarcity. [Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944; Boston, 1957).]
14. [Rosanvallon is referring to his earlier treatment, in Le capitalisme utopique, chap. 5, of the political implication widely drawn in the eighteenth century in light of the prospect of economic ordering, that the functions of the state would turn out to be simple. The phrase “political arithmetic” is from Jean-François Melon and William Petty. Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique, 128–36 at 131.]
15. List, secretary of an association of industrialists with the goal of abolishing internal tariffs, was one of the linchpins responsible for the erection of the Zollverein (German customs union).
16. Thinking of Marx as “Machiavelli’s other,” as Claude Lefort does, is therefore doubly justified and illuminating.
17. One should recall that for Helvétius the term “interest” is not economic. It is simply the general name for the power of human passions.
18. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, 1976), 56.
9. From the Past to the Future of Democracy
1. For Hegel, as Éric Weil notes, “politics is nothing other than the science of the will.” Weil, Hegel et l’État (Paris, 1970), 32.
2. On this point, see the illuminating pages in Pierre Manent, La Cité de l’homme (Paris, 1994), chap. 4, “The Triumph of the Will.” [This book is in English as The City of Man, trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton, 1998).] See also Nicholas Tenzer’s entry in Philippe Raynaud and Stéphane Rials, eds., Dictionnaire de la philosophie politique (Paris, 1996, 2003), s.v. “Volonté.”
3. Cf. Rials, “La droite ou l’horreur de la volonté,” Le Débat 33 (January 1985): 34–48.
4. On this question of the discovery of the unconscious and the dissolution of the image of man as master and possessor of himself, see the interesting work of Marcel Gauchet, L’inconscient cérébral (Paris, 1992). On the problems of and tensions in individual sovereignty in the contemporary world, see Alain Ehrenberg, La Fatigue d’être soi: Dépression et société (Paris, 1998).
5. It suffices to refer to Carl Schmitt, on the right, and Lenin, on the left, to recall specific examples. The fact that these authors have recently been celebrated in common would repay closer scrutiny.
6. Consider, for instance, the emblematic celebration of the figure of the worker by Ernst Jünger. “Technology,” he writes, “is the means by which the worker mobilizes the world.” Jünger, Der Arbeiter, as cited in Jean-François Kervégan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt: Le politique entre spéculation et passivité (Paris, 1992).
7. As an illustration, one can refer to all of the debates on the policies of employment of the decade 1980–1990. In the face of those who deplored the absence of a “real political will” to lead the campaign against joblessness, the reminder to reflect on the meaning of the implicit and silent “preference” for unemployment that resulted from the actual behavior of economic and social actors was well taken.
8. One must also remember that civil society, in Albert Hirschman’s terms, expresses itself frequently through “exit,” as notably in the case of market allocation, while political society lives more in the universe of “voice.” [Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).]
9. And see, recently, Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley, 1984).
10. See also on these points the work of Jean-Marie Donegani and Marc Sadoun, La Ve République, naissance et mort (Paris, 1998), as well as the discussion of their position, notably by Guy Carcassonne and Bernard Manin, in the forum dedicated to this work in Le Débat 106 (September–October 1999): 160–77.
11. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 36.
12. On this point, see the work of Patrick Riley, who has convincingly shown that Rousseau borrowed the idea of the general will from Malebranche, who restricted it to the description of God’s intervention in history. Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton, 1986).
13. This is the central theme of such works as The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1944) or The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, 1960). This perspective presupposes, of course, the highly contestable belief that there is no difference between economic and political liberalism. On this point, see my article, “The Market, Liberalism, and Illiberalism,” chap. 7 in this volume.
14. It bears emphasizing that numerous radical movements have dismissed the question of the political, in their own way, by situating themselves almost exclusively on the terrain of rights. See the illuminating remarks of Philippe Raynaud, “Les Nouvelles radicalités: De l’extrême gauche en philosophie,” Le Débat 105 (May–August, 1999): 90–117.
15. If the problem were simply the need to find a strong will, the means would probably not be democratic: Carl Schmitt’s lessons on this point are edifying enough to be worthy of reflection.
16. Multiple propositions on the latter score were put forward, for example, at the World Trade Organization in Seattle in December 1999.
17. [These enterprises are covered in an earlier section of the book from which this excerpt is taken, La Démocratie inachevée, 59–74.]
18. Adrien Lezay, Qu’est-ce que la constitution de 1793? (Paris, Year III), 10. The division of the individual powers is seen in this framework as the condition of a strengthened social power.
19. I prefer the term “social citizenship” to that of “civil citizenship” as used by Catherine Colliot-Thélène, “L’ignorance du peuple,” in Gérard Duprat, ed., L’ignorance du peuple: Essais sur la démocratie (Paris, 1998), 17–40. Her term could lead one to think that it is not just as political as the form of citizenship involved in voting. But the basic idea is the same.
20. Cf. Dominique Turpin, “Les juges sont-ils représentatifs? Réponse: oui,” Commentaire 58 (Summer 1992): 381–90. See also on this point the famous debates of the revolutionary period.
21. And one should add the possibility, which I cannot elaborate here, of representativity of a moral kind that certain actors possess thanks to their function of alerting the public to emergencies, of unnoticed examples of distress, etc.
22. Édouard Laboulaye, Questions constitutionelles (Paris, 1872), 373.
23. There is actually much to say on this subject, both on the actual decline in the use of the referendum and on the difficulties involved in its prospective extension as a solution to social problems. Lacking the space to develop this question here, I can refer for the time being and for a first approach to the following works: Gérard Conac and Didier Mauss, eds., Le Référendum, quel avenir? (Paris, 1990); Francis Hamon, “Actualité du référendum,” Le Débat 96 (September–October 1997): 51–66; Laurence Morel, “Le référendum, état de recherches,” Revue française de science politique 42, 5 (October 1992): 835–64; Rials, “L’avenir du référendum en France,” La Revue administrative 32, 6 (November–December 1979): 647–58; Serge Sur, “Un bilan du référendum en France,” Revue du droit public 101, 3 (May–June 1985): 591–602.
24. It should be noted that this always fiercely debated vision has been adopted without any difficulty, thanks to the new principle of right of appeal of verdicts from the Cours d’assises adopted in February 2000, in the notion of “democratic judgment” (by a popular jury judging “in the name of the French people”). One could also interpret the fact of cohabitation [of political parties in government] that results from contrasting expressions of the popular will according to this model of “prudential democracy.”
25. Claude Émeri justly writes in this regard that “fear of judicial encroachment on governance also reflects a sacralization of the election as the source of power.” Émeri, “Gouvernement des juges ou veto des sages?,” Revue du droit public (March–April 1990): 336.
26. One should, however, note Sismondi’s contrasting reflections. From the fact that complete sovereignty can only be the attribute of a unanimous subject (with power and liberty perfectly reconciled in such a case), he saw the institutions of regulation and control as prudential systems linking the democratic principle of majority rule with the philosophical principles of unanimity. See J.C.L. Sismondi, Recherches sur les constitutions des peuples libres (reprint Geneva, 1965), chap. 2: “De la souveraineté du peuple.” But most of the great liberal authors preferred to deconstruct the notion of sovereignty as such.
27. Ernest Renan, La monarchie constitutionelle en France (Paris, 1870), 127.
28. [Earlier parts of the work deal with direct democracy in French history.] The indirect character of representative government has its own positive function. It effectuates, at a minimum, a distinction between decision and deliberation, and therefore enlarges participation in deliberation (while direct democracy, enlarging participation in decision, reduces it in deliberation). On this point, see the profound remarks of George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, 1992), chap. 1, “The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy,” and of Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, 1989), chap. 16, “Democracy, Polyarchy, and Participation.”
29. This argument thus goes further than Iris Marion Young’s concept of “deferred democracy,” which consists only in the distinction of the various phases of proposition, deliberation, and decision, in a perspective actually quite close to Condorcet’s. See Young, “Deferring Group Representation,” in Will Kymlicka and Ian Shapiro, eds., Ethnicity and Group Rights (Nomos 39) (New York, 1996), chap. 12.
30. The bibliography on the question is considerable. The most important works are Christopher Aterton, Teledemocracy: Can Technology Protect Democracy? (Beverly Hills, 1987); Jeffrey Abramson, Christopher Aterton, and Garry Orren, The Electronic Commonwealth: The Impact of Media Technologies on Democratic Politics (New York, 1988); and Christal Darryl Slaton, Televote: Expanding Citizen Participation in the Quantum Age (New York, 1992).
31. Cf. “The Future of Democracy,” The Economist, June 17, 1995 and “Happy 21st Century Voters: A Survey of Democracy,” The Economist, December 21, 1996.
32. Cf. Francis Balle, “Mythes et réalités de la démocratie électronique,” Connaissance politique 2 (May 1983): 106–12 and Michael Schudson, “The Limits of Teledemocracy,” The American Prospect 3, 11 (September 1992): 41–45.
33. A Charles Maurras could thus speak of “the immense and undivided moral and material heritage,” noting: “The necessity of holding and saving the fruits of labor of our dead serves hence to define what we are allowed to order and interdict, to dispense with and to keep.” He spoke on this ground of “the unjustified will of the sovereign voter.” Maurras, “Discours préliminaire de l’enquête sur la monarchie,” in Dictionnaire politique et critique (Paris, 1932), 5: 405.
34. I prefer this expression to that of “continuous democracy,” coined by Léo Hamon and taken up by Dominique Rousseau, though the two notions share commonalities. See Hamon, “Du référendum à la démocratie continue,” Revue française de science politique 34, 4–5 (August–October 1984): 1084–1101, and Rousseau, La démocratie continue (Brussels, 1995).
35. On this decisive question, see the suggestive contribution of Stephen Holmes, “Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy,” in Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge, 1988), chap. 7.
36. Victor Hugo, Choses vues, ed. Hubert Juin, vol. 3, 1849–1869 (Paris, 1972), 352.
37. Cf. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76, 6 (November/December 1997): 22–43.
38. The atomistic perspective was never so much justified anthropologically as it was historically necessary, as a condition of the departure from a corporatist society. See on this question the salutary reflections of Alain Renaut, L’ère de l’individu: Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité (Paris, 1989). [This book is in English as The Era of the Individual: Contributions to a History of Subjectivity, trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton, 1997)].
39. On this point, I permit myself to refer to two essays of mine on the subject: “Formation et désintégration de la galaxie ‘auto’,” in Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’auto-organisation, de la physique au politique (Paris, 1983) and “Mais où est donc passée l’autogestion?,” Passé présent 4 (1984): 186–95.
40. The change of tone since the approaches of the 1970s is evident in the report submitted by Jean Auroux, Minister of Labor at the time, in Les Droits des travailleurs (Paris, 1981). “Citizens of the political realm, workers have to be citizens too in their work,” the introduction reads (3). Economic democracy is therefore seen as a mandatory task. The report goes so far as to note that “there is no question of challenging the unity of direction and decisionmaking in private enterprise,” and the word autogestion is not mentioned a single time.
41. Cf. the illuminating remarks of Jean Combacau, “Pas une puissance, une liberté: la souveraineté internationale de l’État,” Pouvoirs 67 (1993): 47–58.
42. In a way, this change involves the rediscovery of the classic Aristotelian perspective. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Les carrefours du labyrinthe (Paris, 1978), and Manent, La Cité de l’homme. [Castoriadis’s text is available in English as Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)].
43. I use this expression [in English in the French text] by way of analogy with the notions of “market failures” or “state failures.”
44. This essential distinction between regulation and institution would have to be invoked in any analysis of European integration or the notion of federalism, too.
45. On this point, cf. Daniel Cohen, Richesse du monde et pauvreté des nations (Paris, 1997); Allen Buchanan, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce (Boulder, 1991); and Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, “On the Number and Size of Nations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, 4 (November 2000): 1027–56. [Cohen’s book is available as The Wealth of the World and the Poverty of Nations, trans. Jacqueline Lindenfeld (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).]
10. The Transformation of Democracy and the Future of Europe
1. [The reference is to Benjamin Constant’s nineteenth-century distinction, in a famous 1819 lecture, between the “ancient” freedom of belonging to a collective and living in public and the “modern” freedom of the individual pleasures of private life. In light of the danger that the hypertrophy of the latter under modern conditions could atomize and privatize the population to the point that self-government collapsed, Constant recommended a new synthesis of the two. See Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, 1988).]
2. [Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).]
3. [The dualistic constitutional theory of Bruce Ackerman is the most prominent American description (and endorsement) of such a two-track politics. See Ackerman, We the People, 2 vols. so far (Cambridge, Mass., 1991–).]
4. [Compare, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) or David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, 1995).]
5. [Larry Siedentop, Democracy in Europe (New York, 2002), chap. 2.]
Postscript
1. Cited by Larry Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 319.