The New Old World (37 page)

Another way of looking at Noiriel's inventory of roles is to consider how far the current scene offers telling illustrations of it. Here the obvious place to start is the governmental type whose profile in the period from the mid-seventies to mid-nineties he etches so vividly. For if the high tide of a belated Cold War liberalism had passed by the end of the century, sequels and mutants continue to occupy much of the landscape. Whatever the blows it received as the conjuncture turned, no paradigm as powerful and pervasive as the vision articulated by Furet could disappear overnight. The most significant trajectory has been that of the thinker who could be regarded as his principal heir, Pierre Rosanvallon.
Originally on the staff of the Catholic trade-union federation, the CFDT, where he wrote the speeches of its leader Edmond Maire, articulating its ideology of
autogestion
and a ‘Second Left', by the early eighties he was a rising star in Furet's constellation, becoming the secretary of the Fondation Saint-Simon. His first work as a historian belonged to the general recovery at the time of France's post-revolutionary liberalism.
Le moment Guizot
(1985) set out to rehabilitate the intellectual, if not political, reputation of the leading statesman of the July Monarchy as a vital stimulus for thinking about contemporary democracy. Three years later, he co-authored with Furet and Jacques Julliard the satisfied balance-sheet of
La République du centre,
celebrating the end of the French exception, even if—this was his contribution—not all, certainly, was yet entirely well with the political system, which needed to be more creatively connected to society at large.
⁵⁹
So far there was not a great deal to distinguish him from other younger lights of the galaxy.

In the nineties, however, he embarked on a large-scale enterprise aiming to excavate the origins and tensions, first of universal suffrage (
Le sacre du citoyen
, 1992), then of democratic representation (
Le peuple introuvable
, 1998), and finally of popular sovereignty (
La démocratie inachevée
, 2000), since the Revolution. Across this broad canvas, he modified Furet's legacy in two ways. The bane of modern French history had not been just the deep-rooted traditions left by the Jacobin voluntarism of the First Republic itself, but also those inherited from the elitist rationalism of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. The result had long been to condemn France to oscillations between an illiberal democracy and an undemocratic liberalism. This impasse had been surmounted not with the top-down arrival of the Third Republic, as Furet had believed, but only when there developed from below, some two decades later, institutions of a new social pluralism—trade-unions, professional associations, political parties—together with a new kind of juridical and social thought. It was that silent revolution of the 1890s, amplified and stabilized by the 1920s, which had finally put France on the
terra firma
of a true liberal democracy.
⁶⁰

Dangers, of course, still surrounded it—the general temptations of totalitarianism or corporatism in the twentieth century, not to speak of the specifically national affliction of a lingering revolutionary monism. Even today, not all was well. By the time Rosanvallon reached his second volume, the Juppé government had been routed on the streets, after a battle in which he had championed its neo-liberal reforms—a defeat he would describe five years later, in a sour retrospect for
Le Débat
, as the triumph of an addled refusal of modernity that was the contemporary opium of the people.
⁶¹
The trilogy, therefore, could not end on quite the same note as that struck by
La République du centre
. Far from France having finally reached a mature—if still far from perfect—political equipoise, it was actually in the eighties, Rosanvallon explained, that a ‘balanced democracy' had started to crumble, producing an unfamiliar disarray, that so far from being comforted by the fall of communism, was even in part attributable to it, as the energizing contrast of democratic to totalitarian systems fell away. The popular will seemed to many increasingly evanescent, with less and less purchase on government. The idea of a sovereign people, however, was not to be abandoned. It had rather to be redefined more realistically, shorn of the metaphysics that had too long attended it, if the French were to enter, as they must, ‘an
ordinary age of politics
'.
⁶²

With this ringing agenda, Rosanvallon was received into the Collège de France. There he has sought to emulate the mode of Furet in creating an extensive network of influence across intellectual and political establishments alike. Organizationally, early years in the backrooms of a trade-union bureaucracy and later experience as major-domo at the Fondation Saint-Simon well equipped him to do so. Within no time, close relations with big business acquired at the Fondation had yielded funding for a new ‘intellectual workshop' to succeed it, the Republic of Ideas, and an arrangement with a leading publisher for a series of books under the same title, followed in due course by a Web-site for broader divulgation of sympathetic notions. Scarcely had the series been
launched than it sent up a Very light signalling its patron's break with associates of the recent past. Hard on the heels of more predictable contributions—its immediate predecessor was
Kaboul Sarajevo
, from Michael Ignatieff—came Daniel Lindenberg's philippic against the distrust of multi-culturalism from a new breed of reactionaries, which had all too often found expression in
Le Débat
. With this, Rosanvallon, who had no doubt chafed for some time at playing second fiddle in the liberal orchestra, made it clear that he was henceforward going to be the composer.

His next project was a second triptych, on the scale of the first, devoted to the transformations of popular sovereignty in the new century, but conceived in a more resolutely constructive spirit. Rawls and Habermas, he explained, had undeniably done much to renovate political thought. Yet their approaches to it had remained too normative, ignoring the complexity of actual democratic experience as it evolved over time, which had been far from linear. What was needed now was rather a philosophical history of the political, closer in inspiration to Foucault, but focussed on the problems of democracy rather than of power.
⁶³
Prominent among these was the gap between procedural legitimacy, conferred by elections, and substantive political trust, increasingly withheld from governments, however correctly voted into office. The tension between the two, however, was no recent phenomenon, but went back a long way, generating a set of institutional forms counter-balancing electoral rule. In the first volume of his new trilogy,
La contre-démocratie
(2006), Rosanvallon offered an inventory of ‘systems of organized distrust', complementing rather than cancelling the verdict of the ballot-box: mechanisms of oversight (from muckrakers to the internet), of veto (from ephors to strikes) and of judgement (from attainders to juries). In the second,
La légitimité démocratique
(2008) he turned to the ways in which legitimacy itself was no longer delivered just by a majority at the polls, but had undergone a ‘revolution' with the growth of institutions based on other principles: impartiality (quangos, central banks), reflexivity (constitutional courts, social sciences), proximity (
bains de foule
, television). In a third volume, still to come, the nation as a form of political community awaits a more complex reinvention, in similar style.

Contemporary democracy, properly understood, was thus a richer affair than the thin models of it proposed by Schumpeter or Popper, as a mere choice between competing elites for office. It was to be conceived, not in a spirit of minimalism, but one of positively minded realism. Naturally, it remained imperfect, and liable to one perversion in particular—the pathology of populism, in which certain forms of ‘counter-democracy' threaten to swallow up democracy itself.
⁶⁴
But if vigilance was required against this danger, the balance-sheet of recent developments was far less negative than conventional expressions of disillusionment with the fate of representative government would have it. The truly ‘remarkable phenomenon' of the period was neither a decline in political engagement nor a rise in the sway of deregulated markets. It was the growth of a self-organizing civil society, expanding an ‘indirect democracy' around and beyond electoral systems.
⁶⁵
Admittedly, this gain had gone together with a loss in salience of the political sphere, more narrowly conceived. But here lay the task of the social sciences, to help repoliticize democracy by endowing it with a more sophisticated understanding of its own destiny. In so doing, a ‘philosophical history of the political' could unite knowledge and action in a single undertaking. Aron and Sartre had embodied, each with intellectual grandeur, the opposite temptations of their generation: an icy reason and a blind commitment, equally impotent. ‘The author of these lines', Rosanvallon concluded, ‘has sought to escape that impasse by formulating a theory of democracy no longer divorced from action to bring it to life'.
⁶⁶

This gesture, at once of succession and supersession, indicates the place in the nation's culture to which Rosanvallon aspires; beyond it, allusions to Rawls and Habermas, the appropriate international standing. Of these hopes, the second rests on an enterprise at least comparable in intention. There can be little doubt that Rosanvallon's accounting of democracy, past and present, is empirically richer than theorizations of an original position or communicative reason. But that advantage is more limited than it might seem, and comes at a price. For, in keeping with its inspiration, in the philosophical history of the political there is more philosophy than history. Foucault's versions of the past, Vincent Descombes once remarked, characteristically had
the form of ‘once upon a time'
⁶⁷
; parables for present instruction, rather than true studies of
res gestae
, they assembled evidence to illustrate philosophemes conceived independently of it. Rosanvallon's trilogies are of the same nature. They display an impressive diligence and erudition, but these rarely yield a true narrative, unfolding instead an eclectic catalogue of dicta and data mustered to serve the intellectual purpose to hand.

More transparently than in the cases of Rawls or Habermas, that purpose is apologetic. Where they outline a normative order in principle embedded in the existing institutions and understandings of Western society, yet in practice often regrettably distorted by them, Rosanvallon moves in the opposite direction, seeking to show that it is a misunderstanding of our actually existing democracy to suppose that it fails to live up to the values of popular sovereignty, which it fulfils in subtler and richer ways than usually imagined. The function of the argument is one of ideological compensation. Rather than lamenting the decay of electoral systems as vehicles of the democratic will, we should be celebrating the emergence of non-electoral forms of accountability and the common good. The bewildering array of surrogates brigaded to this end borders at times on the comic: not only constitutional courts, street processions or auditing commissions, but central banks, ratings agencies and ‘political conversations', of which we are solemnly told there are fifteen million every day in Britain.
⁶⁸
All such are gages of democratic health, though it must be wondered whether, after recent performances, Moody's or the SEC will survive the next edition. But the objective of the exercise is clear: as Rosanvallon puts it, ‘a certain desacralization of electoral life' and ‘multiplication of functional authorities' are essential for that complex sovereignty in which for the first time ‘democracy can be wholly and completely liberal'.
⁶⁹

The core of this extended argument for ‘the importance of not being elected' is, of course, a variant of theories of the regulative state in the Anglo-Saxon world, developed with exemplary clarity by Giandomenico Majone. But where Majone and others have focussed their attention on the European Union, as the purest case of a regulative polity without unnecessary electoral pretensions,
Rosanvallon—who has not so far made any reference to their work—has transferred the same construction downwards to the nation-state itself, on the whole regarded by them as still the domain of a traditional majoritarian democracy, based on popular verdicts at the polls. The shift, however, accounts for the deliberative, even at moments demonstrative, wrapping around the regulative core in Rosanvallon's model. For liberals of Majone's conviction, the market—properly superintended by neutral agencies—is the ultimate seat of impartial judgements that voters cannot trust themselves to deliver. But Rosanvallon is a social, rather than an economic, liberal in the strict sense. So popular forms of veto—marches, strikes, protests—find their place in the repertoire of complex sovereignty, which would otherwise seem too harshly technocratic. But that these remain at best ancillary can be seen from the risks attributed to them. In counter-democracy from below lies the perpetual danger of populism: no comparable peril is ever attested for regulative authority from above. The one is the principle of a new general will; the other, the
supplément d'âme
of a dispossession of the old.

Is the achievement of Furet repeatable? Rosanvallon is not a negligible successor. Like his mentor, he offers a sweepingly didactic vision of the national past, culminating in pointed conclusions for the present; combines positions of power in the academy, prominence in the media, patronage in publishing; enjoys close connexions with the worlds of business and politics; has gathered round him a levy of younger associates and pupils—now adding to this portfolio, outreach on the internet. Still missing, though no doubt the next step, is ascent to America, for which the assiduity in his latest work of footnote references to every cranny of its social sciences can be read as an extended
captatio benevolentiae
. But though in all these respects the public profiles of the two historians as organizers and thinkers are so similar, Rosanvallon's impact has so far remained much more limited. In part, this has had to do with differences of personality and style. Furet possessed an elusive charisma which his stolid successor could scarcely hope to reproduce. His writing, too, had a verve and mordancy lacking in Rosanvallon's well-turned, somewhat priestly, prose—a contrast perhaps in part attributable to background, training in the PCF offering considerably more
tranchant
than formation in the CFDT, with its touch of unction.