Abstract
It is unfortunate but perhaps unsurprising that Pierre Rosanvallon’s work is not better known to the Anglo-American community of political theorists and to readers of this journal in particular. The author of seventeen books (at least five of them translated into English) and the holder of a chair in the College de France, Rosanvallon works more closely with historical materials than most political theorists and yet somewhat less so than intellectual historians of the Cambridge School. His thinking is unabashedly presentist in the sense that he usually addresses problems arising in the current moment. In Democratic Legitimacy, for example, he considers the forces that are undermining democratic legitimacy today and seeks to identify emergent sources on which to rebuild it. In The Society of Equals, his most recent book, he aims to contest rising economic inequality by re-thinking the meaning of equality itself. But Rosanvallon is also a historian: he typically approaches such present-day problems by way of a circuit through the past. There—and this is the heart of his method—he identifies what we might call the “immanent theorists” who shaped that problem into its present form. For example, arguing in Democratic Legitimacy that until recently one pillar of democratic legitimacy has been the notion of a non-partisan and competent bureaucracy open to all qualified applicants, he locates the early theories of such government in the writings of (among others) Leon Duguit in France and Frank J. Goodnow in the United States. These are not names that pop up frequently in bibliographies of political theory—yet, as Rosanvallon demonstrates, we have much to learn from them.
In the superb collection of essays edited by Samuel Moyn and published as Democracy Past and Future (2006), Rosanvallon provides a bracing account of his overall project and method, which he calls “a philosophical history of the political.” A blend of political theory and intellectual and social history, its aim according to Rosanvallon “is to heal the division between political theory and political history, so as to arrive at a point at which the two enterprises fuse” (DPF 67).
The roots of this project lie in the work of Claude Lefort, with whom Rosanvallon studied in the 1970s. Lefort argued that a society is always riven by a split, or gap, between its substance and its self-representation. (The particular society Rosanvallon studies is that of France, especially from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, but a great many of his insights are just as valid in other European and North Atlantic democracies.) This gap is roughly analogous to that between the real and the symbolic order, or between the signified and the signifier, and in modern societies it becomes acutely noticeable. Whereas “in the Middle Ages the social estates were immediately political,” Rosanvallon asserts, “in modern societies . . . positive steps have to be taken in order for the representation of society to be instituted. Visible and tangible appearance has to be given to the society of individuals, and the people must be given a face. The imperative of representation therefore distinguishes modern from ancient politics” (DPF 61–62). In other words, politics (including political institutions, ideas, and theories) is the primary way in which modern societies represent themselves to themselves: “the political and the social are indissociable, since the latter is given sense, is set up, and is staged by the former” (DPF 60). What this means is that we cannot peel the political away from the social (and its history) as if it were a separate phenomenon.
Born in 1948, Rosanvallon self-identifies as a member of the generation of 1968—“les soixantehuitards” in France—and it’s likely that he holds this view of the meaning of the political in part because he wishes to be an engaged intellectual. For once we understand the political to be inextricably social, the study of the political likewise becomes part and parcel of society’s self-representation. According to Rosanvallon, such a view would change the way political theorists understand their intellectual labor. “What is at stake,” he writes,
is the connection between erudition and involvement. The philosophical history of the political is able simultaneously to forge instruments of understanding and tools for practical involvement. The aim is to reach the point where the distinction between knowledge and action vanishes. It means participating in the process through which society might no longer separate knowledge about itself from intentional action on itself. (DPF 71)
The implications of this aspiration are obviously far-reaching. If taken seriously, they would require political theorists to handle many of their key terms—for example, rights, sovereignty, citizen, freedom, equality, democracy—not as bare ideas produced by individuals in a genealogy of intellectual history, nor even as signifiers in a matrix of signs, but as expressions of a social history. These ideas are like actors being cast in various roles and put on stage and thereby tested. The performance of the ensemble is a continual representation of what their audience, society, sees and wishes itself to be. Consequently, we cannot understand or judge them apart from the role their audience (society) calls on them to play. The political theorist must therefore be a historian of society as well an expert in theoretical argument. Her sources must include not just recognizable works of political theory (be they by Hobbes, Honneth, or Honig) but as well
literary works, the press and the movement of opinion, pamphlets and formal speeches, emblems and signs. More broadly still, the history of the events and institutions has to be taken into account, so that, to this extent, no subject matter is really exclusive to this type of history of the political. (DPF 63)
Like most of Rosanvallon’s earlier work, The Society of Equals responds to a particular, present-day political problem—in this case, the fact of ever-widening economic inequality all around the world. The salutary question Rosanvallon poses is, why is nothing being done about this problem, not even when majorities in democracies around the world recognize it to be one? His answer is that our present conception of equality no longer has political traction and can no longer galvanize people into action. Just here, we see that Rosanvallon’s project has strong affinities with those of political theorists like Michael Sandel who aim to intervene not just in the field’s understanding of democracy but in “public philosophy,” which Sandel defines as “the political theory implicit in our practice, the assumptions about freedom and citizenship that inform our public life.” 1 Rosanvallon argues that rather than attributing rising economic inequality to “material” forces we can hardly define, much less control (“neo-liberalism,” “capitalism”), and in relation to which our ideas seem puny or irrelevant, we should seek to re-imagine and breathe new life into the public’s understanding of equality.
To do so, he proposes, political theorists must first acknowledge that equality is an idea with a history, specifically a social history, one that extends from the late eighteenth century to the present day. We must study that history—not in the mode of the history of ideas but as the unfolding of a relation between equality as a political principle and equality as a social aspiration. To begin, we must look to the moment when equality was “invented” and recover how it was first understood, described, and justified; from that point, we trace its history forward to our own time, noting the changes the idea has undergone in relation to society’s changing understanding of itself. Only then will we be able to diagnose why our present understanding of equality comes up short in the struggle against widening economic inequality, and only then will we be able also to re-conceptualize equality so it can meet the exigencies of the present moment.
Most of The Society of Equals is devoted to providing such a history, and—not surprisingly, most of Rosanvallon’s account is centered in France and in French history, with shorter sections on Britain and the United States. (The sections on the United States are remarkably well informed.) To construct this history, Rosanvallon relies mainly on primary sources—speeches, pamphlets, newspaper editorials, and above all works by those whom I have called “immanent theorists.” For it is in such sources that we find a society’s first or changing utterances of an idea like human equality, articulations that are subsequently (or even concurrently) taken up and cast in the form of political theory that we recognize to be such.
Rosanvallon’s history of the idea of equality has two main movements. In the first, equality is invented as a way of representing aspirations to be a “society of equals,” by which was meant specifically a classless society without inherited privilege or legitimated distinctions of rank. (Thus, the idea did not as yet imply perfect equality among all individuals regardless of gender, ethnicity, race, and the like.) This notion of equality as a society undivided by caste and class was gradually assembled, elaborated upon, and instituted through such means as universal suffrage. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, in the gilded age of monopoly capital with its creation of immense fortunes, the dream of a society of equals fell into abeyance. Feudalism returned in a frankly plutocratic form. Darwinism was hijacked to justify a hierarchical society in which success is both achieved and justified by biological “fitness.” Fewer and fewer voices dared to proclaim the virtues of equality. Class and caste prevailed again.
Rosanvallon’s second movement carries readers from the progressive era through the Depression and the creation of the welfare state to the elections of Reagan and Thatcher and the advent of what Rosanvallon calls the “society of singularities” (SE 260). This, too, is a narrative of ascension and fall. A wide range of immanent theorists—academics, reformers, journalists, suffragists, and labor organizers—gradually assembled a newly compelling idea of equality. It, too, was rooted in a vision of society. This was a society that cared for all its members, a society in which every individual deserved a “safety net.” The security of society rested on the security of each individual. Society’s conception of itself as a society of equals was again established and represented on the stage of politics, through specific acts of legislation and through the identification of certain political parties with such a vision.
But this vision of equality, too, faltered over time. We now live in an age of what Rosanvallon calls “generalized competition” (SE 234) in which all social bonds are being ground to powder and the notion of individual “singularity” reigns supreme. These conditions are not about to disappear, so any new theory of equality capable of fighting rising inequality must take them into account. This is what his own theory proposes to do.
Unfortunately, Rosanvallon’s style of thinking gets awkwardly in the way of his exposition of his renovated theory of equality. He is relentlessly analytic in the sense that he thinks by taking unitary concepts and finding the logical seams along which they can be broken apart into smaller units, and then dividing those sub-units into their logically distinct parts, and so on, almost indefinitely at times. This disintegrative style can produce exhilarating insights but it can also leave one wishing that he would put Humpty Dumpty back together again and move forward. He writes, for example, that generalized competition “magnifies the key features of market society in three ways” (SE 237) and then guides readers into each of these. Emerging from the third, we enter his account of equality of opportunity only to be directed into “five definitions” of this idea, each of which he proceeds to explain. We exit the fifth definition to discover that equality of opportunity also has “three blind spots” (SE 255). After navigating his brief account of each of these, we finally arrive at his theory of a “society of equals” but—no surprise here—we instantly discover that this has “three constitutive figures”; his accounts of each of these are broken painstakingly into four subsections.
Taken alone, each of these moves makes good sense and yields illuminating and persuasive results. But experienced cumulatively, they remind me of nothing so much as traveling by train in Italy: every time we feel ourselves moving forward again at full speed, a sudden deceleration dashes our hope of ever arriving at our destination. This is a shame, because Rosanvallon’s core idea should be allowed to stand forward with clarity and force. In essence, it is that our efforts to rethink the meaning of equality for the twenty-first century should abandon recent efforts to define equality as equality of opportunity and instead revive the eighteenth century’s “revolutionary spirit of equality—the desire to create a society of equals” (SE 257).
According to Rosanvallon, the shortcomings of equality based on opportunity are twofold: first, “many authorities have used the idea in an essentially rhetorical way to discredit, in the name of equality, proposals to redistribute wealth. . . . It was introduced as an antidote to the demonized term ‘egalitarianism’” (SE 243). Second, “it is incapable of establishing a political theory of justice” (SE 249).Rosanvallon’s elaboration of this second claim is too brief to be entirely convincing, but it certainly succeeds in raising doubts about the efficacy of such theories, whether advanced by Amartya Sen or Ronald Dworkin or John Roemer. What we need, he believes—and this is where his deep theory about the relation of the political to the social comes into play—is a renewed commitment to a society of equals. By this he means a renewed commitment to living together as social animals and recognizing the inherent value of constituting ourselves as a society not just as an aggregation of individuals. Whereas the 18th-century notion of such a society revolved, as he shows, around the principles of similarity, independence, and citizenship, a new one must recognize that we live in “an age of singularity”—that is, at a time when a society of equals must be understood “in terms of singularity” reconciled with “reciprocity, and communality” (SE 260). 2
To accomplish such reconciliation, Rosanvallon first observes that the very idea of singularity—of being one’s self and nobody else—is itself comparative. That is, to be singular or particular, one needs a background of others from whom one differs as well as an audience of others by whom one’s singularity is recognized and affirmed. Rosanvallon then turns to two ideas that will also be familiar to all political theorists. The first is “reciprocity,” by which he means a range of recent theory that emphasizes recognition, relationship, and relational goods, including the position that rights are essentially relational in nature. The second is “communality,” which would replace ethnic and national senses of communal belonging with one based on co-participation in events experienced together, on mutual understanding formed through information about each other and increased opportunities for face-to-face meetings and dialogue across our differences, and on “circulation,” or moving through shared space. Here, Rosanvallon walks familiar ground: Aristotle’s conception of democratic citizenship as a form of friendship looms large in his account, as it does in Danielle S. Allen’s Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v Board of Education (2004).
Rosanvallon’s contribution to re-imagining equality is thus primarily historical and synthetic. His account of equality reminds us of its historical contingency—and therefore malleability—and provides a rootstock onto which to graft a new conception of it. If his theoretical contribution to such a concept is not strikingly original, its modest aggregation of ideas others have put in play has the ring of common sense. To my mind, the one weakness of Rosanvallon’s approach is that his very conception of the relation between the social and the political makes it hard to see how changes in political ideas can effect changes in society. However sensible it might be to think of equality in terms of a society of equals, society seems not to wish to think of itself as such (as Rosanvallon himself declares). Somehow, a renovation of the social must be achieved before we can deploy a renovated notion of equality. But how is this work to be done—and what role can political theorists play in reconstructing the social imaginary? Rosanvallon seems to believe that the “indissociable” bond between the social and the political is symmetrically dialectical—with the changed representation able to modify the thing being represented as much as it expresses it—but his own research casts some doubts on this picture and suggests that society is the dog that wags the tail.
To conclude on this note would be unfair and unwise, for Rosanvallon’s importance may lie elsewhere. I suspect that many political theorists who read his work will, like me, find themselves reckoning with the possibility that his project is more complete and more rigorous than theirs. (I am not speaking here of theorists whose intention is to clarify the meaning of an author or text, but only of those whose intention is to interpret the meaning of an author or text in order to clarify a political problem presenting itself in our time.) It may be more complete because (in my view anyway) he is correct: outside of Scandinavia, democratic politics is, in fact, called upon to represent the social to itself (although I think this work is now done more by popular culture than by politics, which itself is being turned into a form of mass entertainment).
It therefore makes little sense to argue about the nature of “equality” in the abstract, as a political idea; rather, we should approach it in Rosanvallon’s manner—as a modality through which a society has represented itself to itself, a figure a society must test in experience in order to verify and adapt it to changing historical circumstances. Equality must be understood, then, in and through its social history: “Political concepts (democracy, liberty, equality, and so forth) can be understood only through the historical work of their testing and the historical search for their clarification” (DPF 45). But this does not mean reducing it to the status of an inert historical phenomenon. After all, we who are pondering its meaning stand ourselves inside this dynamic relation between the social and the political. We ponder the meaning of equality because we seek to imagine or create a meaning that represents our society better or more faithfully—in Rosanvallon’s case, as a society of equals. Political theory practiced along these lines might never quite “reach the point where the distinction between knowledge and action vanishes.” But it is likely that our work would benefit from “participating in the process through which society might no longer separate knowledge about itself from intentional action on itself” (DPF 71).
While many political theorists may shrink from the sheer quantity of intellectual labor Rosanvallon’s project demands, at least one of his techniques can be profitably employed without self-immurement in the archives. This is his use of what I have called “immanent theorists.” Such thinkers are theorists in and of their own times. They make no claim to occupy a position outside of history from which the truth of things can be discerned. They are intent on arguing for a particular policy or principle; they think of themselves as historical actors, not philosophers. In my own field of African American political thought, virtually every figure I study—from David Walker to Audre Lorde—is an immanent theorist. But such theorists abound elsewhere, and they include, for example, Frances Wright, Robert Owen, Orestes Brownson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lean Meslier, Bertrand Barere, Leonard T. Hobhouse, Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney, Michael Harrington, Betty Friedan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Titmuss, Naomi Klein, and Rebecca Solnit. If political theorists today made a practice of bringing such figures into conversation with, say, Arendt, Agamben, or Aristotle, the field would gain significant historical ballast. And by tracing the ways political theories have emerged in history and helped shape specific policies—from universal suffrage to the creation of meritocratic bureaucracies, from primary elections to the social welfare state to legal protections against domestic abuse—we might rediscover what we sometimes doubt: that ideas really do matter.