| Review of: | Democracy Past and Future by Pierre Rosanvallon |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Julian Bourg |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 04, Pages 661-670 |
Book Reviews
Pierre Rosanvallon has emerged as arguably the most significant thinker among those in France during the 1970s who pioneered a wide-ranging "return to the political." Currently Chair in the modern and contemporary history of the political at the Collège de France, his importance stems from his willingness to consider the continuing emancipatory possibilities of democracy in light of the tensions and contradictions that have made up its modern history. Samuel Moyn has introduced, partially translated, and thoughtfully edited this, the first collection of Rosanvallon's writings throughout his career to appear in English. Though written over the past thirty years, the essays read together form a coherent picture of both Rosanvallon's trajectory and where he thinks democracy has been and is going.
The first two essays, including Rosanvallon's 2002 inaugural lecture at the Collège, lay out his overall program and touch on methodological considerations. He describes his philosophical history of the political as a "total history" (65), a sort of queen of the human sciences who gathers society, economics, politics, and intellectual life into her train. In lesser hands the program might be accused of unwieldy eclecticism. Fortunately, Rosanvallon's perceptive and rigorous analyses more than compensate for the sort of meta-theoretical and methodological issues that are usually fascinating but rarely satisfying. The substantive heart of the collection is organized around three principal thematic poles: post-1789 French political culture, market liberalism, and the future of democracy.
The French Revolution remains a foundational and structuring event that has oriented the flow of political life over the past two centuries. More specifically, modern French political culture has grappled with unresolved (and unresolvable) dilemmas related to questions of unity, voluntarism, and rationalism as they in turn have related to popular sovereignty, representation, mediation, and liberal-democratic articulation. The revolutionary democracy of the 1790s foregrounded the paradoxical status of "the people" both as the source of political power and as an abstract entity that could not be fully represented. Yet the political vision of a polity coinciding with itself (Jean-Jacques Rousseau's General Will exemplified the model) did not measure up to or square with social reality, whose complexity, internal divisions, and diversity defied and evaded projected unification. The radical voluntarism of the revolutionary period expressed frantic efforts to institute a new social and political form, from the spontaneous assertion of the-people-as-crowd to the contradictory dynamics of the Terror (which witnessed representatives' claims to incarnate the people and heal the divide between representation and reality, meanwhile denying that they were engaged in representation at all). In other words, immediacy emerged as an element of French political culture during the Revolution, targeting at first the mediatory institutions of the Old Regime but then giving rise to overriding suspicions toward the kinds of mediations that characterize liberal-democratic societies. The pure assertion of immediate will was, of course, intended to fuse the collective in redemptive, egalitarian wholeness. One could find these dynamics at work again in debates on universal suffrage during the 1830s and 1840s when "republican utopianism" (108) expressed a fantasy of transparency, socio-political coincidence, and eventually economic equality - all of which revealed illiberal tendencies. Universal suffrage, then, was portrayed less as a decisionistic process and more as a ritualized, celebratory expression of a socio-political unity presumed to be already real and actual. French political culture, one could say, has had issues with pluralism.
But the dilemma of the spontaneous voluntarism of popular sovereignty ran into other paradoxes and contradictions once the heat of revolutionary events faded. Rosanvallon's approach to the nineteenth century, and especially to figures such as François Guizot whom he submits for revisionist reconsideration, pursues how dynamics unleashed by the French Revolution played themselves out, both as structural repetition and as historical elaboration. How to keep alive the promise and potential of the Revolution while adapting and normalizing its potential in the context of less volatile everyday-ness? For their part, Guizot and the Doctrinaires in the early nineteenth century sought to preserve the liberal-democratic possibilities initiated by the Revolution while steering a middle course between the excesses of the Terror and counter-revolutionary reaction. Rational government and a science of politics (akin, one might add, to contemporaneous utopian socialist efforts, as well as anticipating later French technocracy) promised a way forward and out. Reason ought to govern, for the promises and moderation of liberal-democratic society were themselves held to be inherently rational. Guizot envisioned a culture of temperate meritocrats who would tame the savage (voluntarist) tendencies of democracy while advancing its substantive program against the retreating vestiges of the Old Regime; in other words, he described the culture of middle-class French liberalism and the "educated" Republic.
Thus, a drive to unity suspicious of pluralism; a voluntarist penchant for immediate, direct democracy against purportedly aristocratic, mediatory representation; and a confidence in a rationalism expressed by the state, its laws, and regulations - within this matrix, elements of the "French equation" (140) congealed. In the long-term search for, the right recipe for liberal-democracy, a foundational tension emerged, according to Rosanvallon, between popular sovereignty and political rationalism, between "tribute to the will" and the "cult of reason" (127). Against the spontaneous directness of the people, proponents of elitist liberalism such as Guizot and, in a different way, Alexis de Tocqueville asserted a rationalism ultimately based in nature and thus immune from the vagaries and caprices of the crowd. The immutability of natural rights made the fundamental constitution of political society unalterable, and they served as the cornerstone of a state whose prerogative was to administer and regulate, and not strictly speaking to govern. To the state similarly fell the task of educating the public and forming citizens who would fulfill their individuality in the convergence, coincidence, and coordination of the socio-political whole. The figuration of citizens as abstract individuals, uplifted from the messy and conflicted zone of what the French now call "communitarianism," abetted this process. The political realm thus became the preferred site for healing social divisions that were understood not as the pluralistic material of liberal society but rather as a perverse alienation. Though Rosanvallon does not pause to consider the issue, the potential hand-in-glove relationship of Marxism to this political culture is clear. The French equation of a pedagogical state through which particularism is subordinated to universalism and division to unity has, however, been haunted by unavoidable equivocations and contradictions: between the general will as the nation's will and the popular will, between the general will and representative institutions, between the people and reason, between citizenship and popular power, between symbolic participation and the organization of power, between meritocracy and utopian democracy - in short, between the state that embodies reason and the people who express their sovereign will. Since 1789, French political culture has thus treated democracy as a social form, state technocracy as rational power, and the general will as the potentially recalcitrant student of the instructing nation.
The second major theme addressed by Rosanvallon's essays, albeit briefly, concerns market liberalism. There are important differences, but also telling similarities, between an economic system based on the market and a political system based on the form of the contract. In the eighteenth century commerce was seen as a way to explain the conflicts and competitive interactions not addressed by political contract theory. In ways opposite to Rousseau, Adam Smith and even Thomas Paine saw the market as the answer to remaindered questions about social integration. And yet, the aspirations of economic liberalism bear a striking parallel to the kind of political unification, transparency, and immediacy discussed above. In imagining "a civil society immediate to itself and entirely self-regulated," market society and "utopian capitalism" aspire to a non- or anti-political "depersonalization" of society and a regulative proceduralism (148, 152, 154). Their hostility to mediation and representation finds analogues in post-1789 French political culture and, so too, in socialism. It is at this point that Rosanvallon makes one of his simplest yet valuable claims: that Karl Marx should be considered Adam Smith's "natural heir" (153, 160). Not only did Marx accept and build on central tenets of eighteenth-century political economy, while offering an obviously more circumspect evaluation of capitalism's merits; more to the point, he sought "to deepen modern individualism" (capitalism blocked the full development of each person) and ended up "consummat[ing] the modern illusion of social transparency" by envisaging post-revolutionary authenticity and equality (168, 182). And he did so in ways that drifted, fatefully, toward totalization. Ultimately, both utopian capitalism and its socialist critics tended to elevate the primacy of civil society over and against the political.
From an analysis of the historical contradictions of post-1789 French political life and a critical exposition of the deep parallels between economic and social modes of thought otherwise taken as antithetical, Rosanvallon moves to an assessment of the shape and prospects of democracy today. He acknowledges widely observed phenomena related to political stagnation in the West, such as voter apathy and distrust in state institutions. Rather than see such factors as merely signs of "decline" (236), and thereby inviting a kind of nostalgia for a supposed earlier era of participation and civic engagement, he observes that such problems and ambivalences have always been around. To some extent, the more familiar we are with the tensions and contradictions of the history of democracy, the less perhaps we ought to be surprised. Still, there are distinctive features of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century political life. Some of them, such as diminishing appeals of political voluntarism, may present new possibilities; others, such as the collapse of nations from below and "the waning of hitherto accepted norms of solidarity" (215), present new dangers. Among other signs of a potentially vital "ordinary age of the political," he notes "the growth of the self-organizing capacity of civil society," a retreat from the ideas of the "collective will" and popular sovereignty, the emergence of "complex" forms of sovereignty whereby citizens are watched and keep watch in turn, a "generalization" of emancipation to a global scale wherein nations have not lost their effectiveness, the expansion of forms of "indirect democracy" such as citizen oversight and advocacy groups, and the formulation of "mixed regimes" (for the Ancients a sure sign of imminent disorder) in which pre-democratic, post-democratic, indirect democratic, liberal, judicial, civil, and de-politicized elements combine in manifold patterns (193-94, 196, 199, 209, 238, 243-48). Notwithstanding complexities and his admirably indefatigable pull toward possibility and the future, Rosanvallon does end on a plaintive note: a repoliticization of democracy is desperately needed in order to stave off a continuing "hollowing of the political" (249). He joins the chorus of the many thoughtful scholars today who refuse to settle for the political options our historical moment seems to serve us ready-made. To his mind, democracy is "a combat that will never have finished with its difficulties or even with the search for its object" (159).