Pierre Rosanvallon’s Democratic Legitimacy and the legacy of antitotalitarianism in recent French thought

I. Introduction: Democracy after ’68

In recent years, the intellectual aftermath of the May 1968 uprising in France has become a major topic of investigation for historians of European thought. According to many, the decade following ’68 must be understood as something of a caesura in French political thought: namely, as the period during which orthodox communism lost its allure for many French intellectuals, who began to search for ways of thinking about politics beyond the traditional categories of Marxist analysis. While most agree that the 1970s bore witness to a variety of new theoretical démarches for French political thought, there is some disagreement about how best to understand the intellectual developments of this period. Some have focused on the so-called ‘antitotalitarian moment’ of the decade, when thinkers such as Claude Lefort, François Furet, and the so-called ‘New Philosophers’ – André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy – began their full-scale assault on Marxist theory, the Soviet Union, and the Parti communiste français(PCF), shortly after the translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelagointo French in 1974 (Christofferson 2004). Others have argued that the 1970s are best understood as having witnessed the rebirth of ethical thought in France, as concern with prisoners’ rights, the politics of gender and sexuality, and psychiatric ethics began to replace revolutionary élan among France’s intellectual elites (Bourg 2007). There is still more divergence in the evaluation of these transformations: while some have lauded the gradual turn away from the revolutionary legacy of ’68 as a much needed coming to terms with the ‘delusions’ of gauchismeand Maoism (Wolin 2010), others have castigated these same intellectuals for abandoning utopian politics and for paving the way for the depoliticized human rights discourse and neo-liberal ideologies of the 1980s and ’90s (Ross 2002).

Despite these differences of historical interpretation, most agree that the late 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of a renewed interest in democratic political theory in France, with thinkers such as Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent, and Pierre Rosanvallon all turning their attention to the history and theory of democracy and liberalism in the West – topics that had largely been neglected in the preceding decades of French political theory. ¹ Rosanvallon, who among these thinkers has done the most to revivify the study of democratic institutions in France, described this shift of focus during the ’70s from Marxist to democratic theory in an interview from 2001:

According to Rosanvallon, the utopian Marxist vision of the ‘withering away of politics’ (Rosanvallon 2006: 150) failed to take seriously the primacy of politics and social conflict in human life. And it left no place for a positive vision of collective political engagement and solidarity. In its place, a new theory of politics was needed to hazard ‘the question of living together, of the capacity to accept and to recognize divisions and differences, of the difficulty of explaining the mechanisms whereby a society implicitly gives itself limits to solidarity, silently builds walls against the equality that it proclaims’ (Rosanvallon 1980: 82).

Rosanvallon’s conviction that Marxism lacked a realistic account of the difficulties and promises of political life was emblematic, in many ways, of this larger transformation in French political theory after 1968: away from utopian and towards liberal forms of political thought. Rosanvallon initially came into the intellectual orbit of the emerging liberal and antitotalitarian left in the early 1970s while working as a theorist of the noncommunist labor union Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) and editor of the group’s journal, CFDT-Aujourd’hui. During these years, Rosanvallon was a prominent advocate of ‘autogestion’ (self-management), a newly-popular political concept in France used to describe syndicalist-style self-management of the workplace, but also applied more generally to the ideals of political and social autonomy (see Rosanvallon 1983). His academic career took off in earnest in 1977, when Furet, upon assuming the presidency of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), invited Rosanvallon to join an informal seminar on political theory along with Gauchet, Manent, and political scientist Bernard Manin. After finishing his studies at the EHESS, Rosanvallon took over directorship of Furet’s Institut Raymond Aron and, since then, has become one of France’s most prolific and well-known political theorists. In 2001, he was awarded a chair at the Collège de France in ‘Modern and Contemporary History of Politics’. ² Rosanvallon’s academic work has been dedicated to explaining the conjoined history of democracy and its totalitarian twin and reflecting on how, after the decline of the revolutionary ideal, democratic institutions should be shaped to protect the liberty and autonomy of every member of society.

This review essay will examine Rosanvallon’s theories of democracy and, in particular, the claims of his recently translated work, La légitimaté democratique: Impartialité, reflexivité, proximité(2008; English translation, 2011). In so doing, it will both contextualize Rosanvallon in reference to his primary influences – Lefort and Furet – and show how his new work emerges out of and builds upon the antitotalitarian conceptual framework provided by them. Ultimately, by drawing on examples of recent challenges faced by democracy in the United States, it will dispute Rosanvallon’s characterization of his democratic theory as a ‘realistic’ alternative to revolutionary political thought. ³ In particular, it will argue that Rosanvallon’s forward-looking institutional vision for democracy does not adequately take into account the problems posed by power, ideology, and special interests in contemporary democratic governance.

II. Between Lefort and Furet: An outline of Rosanvallon’s political thought

As Rosanvallon has himself frequently admitted, it was Lefort and Furet who did the most to provide him with the conceptual foundations of his theory of democracy (see, e.g., Sebastián and Rosanvallon 2007: 707). Lefort’s understanding of modern democracy drew on a highly specific definition of the ‘political’ as the ‘overall schema governing both the temporal and spatial configuration’ in any given society and as the ‘processes that make people consent to a given regime … that determine their manner of being in society’ (Lefort 2006: 152, 150). In an essay from 1981, ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’, Lefort described the advent of modern democracy after 1789 as a fundamental rupture in the symbolic schema that had, until then, generated the ‘conditions of intelligibility’ of social and political life under the monarchy (2006: 153). In brief: ⁴ during the ancien régime, the king, whose body partook of both divine and human natures, symbolically united the body politic within his personhood and under his rule: ‘his immortal and supernatural body’, Lefort wrote,

During the Revolution, the symbolic unity of the body politic under the king – and its link to a transcendent, divine order outside and above it – were broken, as the king body’s itself was destroyed and his semi-divine rule overthrown. Thus began the modern experiment with popular rule: the space once occupied by the absolute and divinely-ordained power of the king could no longer be filled by any one group or individual, but would rather be constantly fought for in the back and forth of democratic contestation.

According to Lefort, a symbolic ‘empty place’ (lieu vide) at the heart of modern society had been created (2006: 160): ‘when society can no longer be represented as a body and is no longer embodied in the figure of the prince, it is time that people, state, and nation … become the major poles by which social identity and social communality can be signified … [But] this identity and this community remain indefinable’ (2006: 166). Lefort’s depiction of the paradox at the heart of democracy – society, heterogeneous and in constant conflict, now stood in tension with its representation of itself as a unified people or nation – served to explain the emergence of totalitarianism as a modern political phenomenon. As the social division and conflict constitutive of modern society became unbearable, power was handed to those who promised to reestablish society’s lost unity and to rule in its name without any form of mediation: ‘Both [fascism and communism] attempt … to give power a substantial reality … to deny social division in all its forms, and to give society a bodyonce more’ (2006: 167). According to Lefort, democracy could avert the totalitarian temptation only by refusing to close the gap between state and society, in the name of the Volk or the proletariat, and thereby safeguard societal heterogeneity and the unending competition over legitimate rule.

In 1978, Furet published a highly influential re-interpretation of the French Revolution, Penser la Révolution Française(Interpreting the French Revolution), that drew upon a similar conceptual juxtaposition of democratic and totalitarian political forms. ⁵ According to Furet, the revolutionaries’ dream of achieving ‘undivided power in a society free of contradictions’ and of creating a ‘totally unified society’ (Furet 1981 [1978]: 30), absent of any form of representation or mediation between the people and the state, had led ineluctably to the terror of the Jacobin dictatorship. According to the democratic ideology of the revolutionaries, society – as the diverse set of actual, living humans in the French polity – was equated precisely with its representation of itself, as ‘the people’: the will of each individual, in other words, was to harmonize completely with that of the generality. When it did not, the individual was deemed an enemy of the people and destroyed. Importantly, for Furet, the lessons learned from the Jacobin dictatorship applied equally well to those of the 20th century: ‘Stalinism’, he wrote, ‘took root in a modified Jacobin tradition’ (1981 [1978]: 11). On his pessimistic reading, the indeterminacy and social conflict that existed at the heart of modern democracies could give way easily, and at any time, to the totalitarian dream of reuniting society and of ruling, with undivided power, in its name. Now that the king is dead, in other words, there will always exist the temptation to reinstate him in another form.

Rosanvallon inherited Lefort’s and Furet’s understanding of this tension at the heart of modern democracy: between the ‘sociological fact’ of society’s complexity and its representation of itself as an abstract and unified political whole’ (Rosanvallon 2006: 82). For Rosanvallon, too, the final resolution of this tension could only be achieved in totalitarian rule – a ‘deviant [form] of democratic modernity’ – and its dream of ‘a society perfectly legible in its unity and a power supposed to be completely identified with it, with the goal of reabsorbing in its very origin the gap between the social and the political’ (2006: 51). The antidote to this tendency was to be found in liberalism with its guarantees of the separation of civil society from the state and the protection of the rights of minorities from that of the ruling majority. According to Rosanvallon, the history of democracy in the West, and particularly in France, has exhibited a constant, ‘schizophrenic’ negotiation between the claims of popular sovereignty and those of liberal pluralism’ (2006: 91). The Jacobin dream of ‘social unity’, fear of intermediary bodies, and equation of the civic and the social bond in the general will gave way in the 19th century to technocratic forms of political liberalism under the restored Bourbon and the July monarchies (2006: 107, 135). The 1848 Revolution, in turn, represented a renewed battle for democratic sovereignty. And so on, according to Rosanvallon, until the present. ⁶ This oscillation between ‘democratic illiberalism’ and ‘undemocratic liberalism’, on his view, has been constitutive of Western political modernity:

For Rosanvallon, modern popular rule, beset by this tendency to fluctuate between democratic and liberal extremes, faces two fundamental challenges: to protect liberal pluralism from the tyranny of the democratic majority and, simultaneously, to guard against the de-politicization and anomie of the excessively liberal polity. The liberal promise to ‘dedramatize’ social conflict represented, on his account, a dangerously naïve vision of the ‘withering away of politics’ (Rosanvallon 2006: 150). In this regard, Rosanvallon understood Adam Smith and Karl Marx as two sides of the same liberal coin: both sought an un-political ‘self-regulated society’ in which the ‘reign of men’ had been traded in for ‘the administration of things’ (2006: 148–52). Both the ‘market utopias’ of late 20th-century neo-liberal ideology and Marxian fantasies of the post-political order were thus corruptions of the emancipatory democratic ideal of organizing ‘the social bond in a positive and legible way, with all of the differences it involves’ (2006: 213).

Remaining loyal both to democracy and liberalism, Rosanvallon argued, required the ‘pluralization’ and diversification of the practices and institutions of popular sovereignty and the creation of new democratic and civil society bodies:

The decline of the ‘metaphysics of the will’ (Rosanvallon 2006: 200) – the political-theological idea that ‘the people’ could assume the shape of a ‘unified body, a personalizable totality’ (2006: 196) – brought with it an end to the belief that this people could be accounted for in toto in the act of voting. Now, in order to account for society in all of its complexity and plurality, and in a way that would not muffle minority voices with that of the majority, there was the need for new means, beyond the ballot box, for expressing political preferences and wills. Throughout his work, Rosanvallon’s aim has thus been to elaborate a realistic political and institutional program for safeguarding Lefort’s ‘empty space’ at the center of democracy, in which no one image of ‘the people’ can exist to the exclusion of another – an effort he has described as no less than the restoration of ‘the political horizon of the left’ (2006: 250). His Democratic Legitimacyrepresents his most thorough attempt at this restoration to date.

III. The pluralization of democratic legitimacy

In this new work, Rosanvallon updates his account of the troubled history of Western democracy by observing that democratic governance has, since the 1980s, faced a serious crisis of legitimation. The increasing complexity of social and economic forms – due to ‘post-Fordist’ models of industrial organization, intensified specialization of labor and the production of consumer goods according to individual tastes – has coincided with a growing distrust, on the part of citizens, of collective political will and of visions of large-scale social transformation. This so-called ‘postmodern’ turn away from grand narratives and towards particularity, discontinuity, and the local has, according to Rosanvallon, been accompanied by a major change in the nature of social roles, expectations, and identities: ‘Social bonds and identities no longer depend on well-defined status groups or relations of production. The threads of the new social fabric now involve elective affinities, temporary relationships for specific purposes, and parallel career paths’ (Rosanvallon 2011: 64). Society, in other words, has grown more complex, less cohesive, and more focused on the individual at the expense of the collective – a series of transformations Rosanvallon refers to as the ‘emergence of a society of particularity’ (2011: 64).

Coinciding with these social and intellectual transformations, and as the result of Reagan- and Thatcher-era policies, has been a gradual erosion of state bureaucracy across the West. For Rosanvallon, the importance of this development cannot be overestimated: bureaucracy, on his reading, had once been seen as the most legitimate institution of the democratic state because of its supposed impartiality and capacity to protect the collective good against the prerogatives of majoritarian rule. The late 20th century also saw a widespread ‘desacralization of elections’, as the gap between the people as sociological fact and as electoral majority grew wider than ever (Rosanvallon 2011: 69). Now ‘winning an electoral majority is no longer quite enough to legitimate a government’ (2011: 70), because ‘the general interest remains in doubt and subject to pressure from many different interest groups’ (2011: 97).

In sum, these developments have combined to create a situation in which society is more complex, pluralistic, and less willing to embark on collective projects than ever before; in which majoritarian electoral politics cannot adequately capture the wills of this social plurality; and in which the civil service has little role to play as impartial arbiter of society’s nearly infinite divergent preferences. The re-legitimation of democracy demands that society and the state account for this increasing social pluralization and particularization in new ways. No longer can the ‘people’ be taken as a ‘bloc’ that gathers together in the moment of voting to express a unified will, but rather must be seen as a multiplicity of peoples, who can register their preferences through a variety of ways – in the election, oversight, and regulation of the functions of the state (2011: 70).

Rosanvallon’s account of how to achieve this ‘radical pluralization of the forms of legitimacy’ (2011: 8) draws on a detailed typology of what he refers to as ‘social generality’, i.e. the general will or society as a whole. In his ideal-typical retelling of the history of democracy, universal suffrage, for example, has represented an ‘aggregative definition’ of generality, with ‘the general will … represented as the voice of the masses of citizen voters’. Rational administrative institutions, on the other hand, have ‘invoked a more objective notion of generality: the idea was that public reason and the general interest were in some sense identified with the structure of the republican state itself’ (2011: 6). After the collapse of electoral and bureaucratic forms of legitimacy, three new forms of generality – to each of which corresponds a different form of legitimacy – are to be invoked in the creation of new, reinvigorated democratic institutions.

First, Rosanvallon describes a form of ‘negative generality’ embodied in institutions and practices that strive to remain equidistant from all of society’s different factions and that operate with greater unanimity and impartiality than the elected branches of government. The generality embodied in this form of unelected institution, Rosanvallon writes, is ‘reflected in the fact that no one can appropriate it’ (2011: 6). Here, Rosanvallon specifically has in mind independent regulatory and oversight bodies that remain aloof from the pressures of public opinion and that ensure society be ‘governed by principles and procedures aimed at eliminating special privileges and arrangements’ (2011: 98). In his 2006 Seeley Lectures at the University of Cambridge, subsequently published as La contre-démocratie(2006: English translation, 2008), Rosanvallon described how independent authorities, courts, internal government audit and evaluation bodies, and even citizen watchdog groups, would function to prevent Lefort’s ‘lieu vide’ from being occupied by any one group seeking to monopolize political power:

The second form of legitimacy Rosanvallon describes in Democratic Legitimacyis ‘reflexive legitimacy’. While the ‘legitimacy of impartiality’ is to be found in institutions that remain equally detached from every member of society, reflexive legitimacy, drawing on an image of the ‘generality of multiplication’, arises from democratic procedures that account for society’s nearly infinite array of divergent interests. Here, the aim is to multiply the ‘expressions of social sovereignty’ (Rosanvallon 2011: 6) in order to achieve ‘a relatively comprehensive vision of the whole’ (2011: 123), without falling prey to the temptation of democratic ‘monism’ whereby the voting people is equated, without division, with the people as a whole. The preferences, values, and wills of the ‘social people’ – the ‘uninterrupted succession of active or passive minorities’ – is here to be protected against the prerogatives of the ‘electoral people’ – that portion of society that ‘takes on numerical reality at the ballot box’ (2011: 130). This is to be achieved by expanding the means through which minorities can express preferences and values in the creation of third-party bodies – such as civil society organizations, social movements, and even social scientific scholarly institutions – that advocate on the behalf of minorities when the governing majority fails to account adequately for their interests.

Above all, according to Rosanvallon, this task of overseeing the rule of the majority falls to constitutional courts. Drawing on the work of contemporary American scholars of constitutionalism such as Stephen Holmes and Larry Kramer, Rosanvallon argues that constitutional courts, by checking majoritarian rule, indirectly ‘increase the power of citizens over institutions’. In so doing, they negotiate between the prerogatives of two competing visions of ‘the people’ (2011: 139): as electoral majority and as abstract principle. The ‘essential role’ of constitutional courts, he writes,

The courts also function in order to prevent the elected executive and legislative branches of government from making short-term decisions detrimental to the long-term health of the polity (2011: 143).

The third and final form of legitimacy Rosanvallon discusses in Democratic Legitimacy,‘the legitimacy of proximity’, is embodied in democratic procedures that allow citizens to express interests and desires directly to leaders and governing bodies and that compel them to respond. The generality embodied by this form of legitimacy is ‘a radical form of immersion in concrete social facts and a determination to comprehend society’s irreducible diversity and complexity’ (2011: 185). Rosanvallon here advocates for a reinvigorated role for a variety of citizen-based ‘counter-democratic’ bodies and practices – ‘neighborhood committees, citizen juries, consensus-building conferences, public forums, public opinion surveys, and participatory budgeting’ – to bring the state down to the level of the individual and to make its functioning both less opaque and more responsive to her demands (2011: 203). This form of ‘interactive democracy’, writes Rosanvallon, demands that ‘leaders immediately react to society’s concerns. These reactions come in the form of responses to society’s exercise of oversight, protest, and judgment in order to exert pressure on leaders to change their decisions’ (2011: 215).

Overall, the three new forms of social generality that Rosanvallon advocates all involve practices and institutions that exist outside of the electoral political system and that protect society from the distortions of majoritarian rule. Democratic impartiality calls for the creation of non-elected institutions that operate according to general rules and equally in the interest of all. Reflexivity requires watchdog groups and constitutional courts to force the state to take the interests of electoral losers into account. Finally, the politics of proximity make the state more responsive to the interests of individuals and citizen groups, allowing them to take a greater role in shaping policy, overseeing state operations, and ensuring that leaders recognize social particularity. Rosanvallon differentiates these three forms of generality by means of a visual metaphor: ‘one can examine an object with a telescope; examine various cross-sections of the object under a microscope; or explore the object by tracing a series of paths through it’ (2011: 7). These new forms of generality are to be achieved by two simultaneous transformations: first, through the reinvigoration of civil society and the creation of ‘counterdemocratic’ practices and bodies; second, through the creation of new organs of the state that will compensate for the shortcomings of electoral politics by drawing upon older, bureaucratic ideals of impartiality, universality, and rational rule. Rosanvallon refers to the sum of these transformations – away from the tendency of democracy to lead to the oppressive monism of the electoral majority and towards a system whereby social plurality can be better accounted for in the procedures of popular rule – as the ‘de-centering’ of democracy (2011: 1). His Democratic Legitimacymust be read as an institutional blueprint for the achievement of this aim.

IV. Conclusion: A realistic theory of democracy?

According to Rosanvallon, one of the strongest recommendations of his theory of democracy is its supposed ‘realism’. In many places throughout his oeuvre, including in Democratic Legitimacy, Rosanvallon has referred to his political thought as a realistic alternative to utopian and revolutionary politics. In a recent interview in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Rosanvallon even declared that realism lay at the heart of his political imagination: ‘One can say that the dominant element in my intellectual life is the idea that in order for contemporary societies to enrich their democracy, they must arrive at a more realistic grasp of its difficulties’ (Sebastián and Rosanvallon 2007: 705). Rosanvallon’s desire to understand the ‘difficulties’ of collective social life is not new. Many years earlier, he had taken Cornelius Castoriadis to task in a forum in the journal Espriton precisely this point, bluntly asking Castoriadis, after the latter had defended the ongoing viability of revolutionary Marxism: ‘What are the concrete conditions, theoretical and practical, of a veritable auto-institution of society? It appears to me that you remain rather silent on this point’ (Castoriadis 1979: 333). Rosanvallon’s challenge to Castoriadis was emblematic of his larger suspicion of revolutionary leftist thought: that it lacked a realistic account of collective political life and workable, institutional solutions to its challenges.

It is unclear, however, to what extent Rosanvallon’s own political theory offers a sufficiently realistic portrait of contemporary democracy. In particular, one wonders whether Rosanvallon’s acute fear of majoritarian politics leads him to misdiagnose the most pressing challenges faced by democracy today across the globe. In this respect, the shadow of Furet and his fear of contemporary forms of Jacobinism seem to loom very large over Rosanvallon’s thought. It is not altogether clear, however, whether their shared antitotalitarian politics – while perhaps appropriate to the political climate of 1970s France – remains the most useful lens through which to diagnose the ailments of contemporary democracy. ⁷ Is it not the case, for instance, that growing suspicion of collective political projects and societal particularization – phenomena that Rosanvallon himself describes at length – make it less likely now that one group will be able to successfully rule in the name of all others? And after the eclipse of grand political narratives and the ‘metaphysics of the will’, how much is the rebirth of Robespierre- or Stalin-style party rule an active threat? This is not to suggest that the problem of democratic majoritarianism does not exist, nor to question Rosanvallon’s innovativeness in suggesting solutions to it, but rather to call attention to the fact that Rosanvallon’s own account of the social fragmentation of contemporary society does not seem to fit neatly with his overriding fear that one group, the electoral majority, will rule oppressively in the name of all others.

Precisely because Rosanvallon dedicates so much energy to the problem of democratic majoritarianism, moreover, he refrains from commenting in depth on what is arguably a much larger problem in contemporary democracy: namely, the susceptibility of democratic institutions and practices to the influence of powerful – and, particularly, financially powerful – groups in society, and the malleability of governmental priorities according to their prerogatives. While Rosanvallon does take seriously the problem of ‘special interests’ in democracies, and intends the complex system of checks and balances he describes in Democratic Legitimacyto address this issue, he does not offer an account of how special interest groups emerge, gain power, and actually work to distort democratic procedures. Overall, in fact, his Democratic Legitimacy lacks any real account of how power, and particularly economic power, actually operates in democracies. How is it the case, for example, that the media, an institution whose watchdog role in defending the collective good Rosanvallon celebrates, can actually operate to protect the prerogatives of the few against the interests of the whole? How is it that the priorities of regulatory bodies – such as bond rating agencies, financial regulatory institutions, and energy regulatory commissions – can be shaped by the interests of the industries they are intended to oversee? The democratic theory Rosanvallon elaborates in Democratic Legitimacydoes not present any obvious means of addressing problems such as these.

Indeed, Rosanvallon’s new work does not offer any real account of how exactly the new institutions it calls for will work to mitigate the distorting influence of powerful interest groups – and of whether these new institutions will not themselves be vulnerable to outside manipulation. In particular, without any consideration of the ways in which power relations are constituted and operate in contemporary democratic societies, Democratic Legitimacyremains silent on how and whether these new impartial and reflexive bodies will actually act to protect the public good from narrow special interests.

In a political system such as that of the contemporary United States, in which the priorities of both civil society groups and the organs of the state can so easily be shaped by the prerogatives of well-heeled private groups, multiplying the number of bodies in society more likely means multiplying the points of contact between competing claims to power than achieving some kind of automatic, self-correcting balance of power. There is no reason to believe, in other words, that simply having more institutions will make their competing claims balance out for the sake of the collective good.

Take Rosanvallon’s call, for example, for new impartial institutions such as oversight bodies, regulatory agencies, NGOs, and bipartisan commissions to act in the name of the collective good when electoral politics fails to do so. What reason is there to believe that these bodies will not themselves become captive to ideology or prerogatives of special interest groups or of the state that are detrimental to the interests of the whole? Rosanvallon does not address this challenge; instead, he merely insists that these bodies will treat ‘all issues according to the dictates of law and reason. Independent regulatory and oversight bodies are organized so as to facilitate the attainment of these goals’ (Rosanvallon 2011: 98). Rosanvallon leaves himself open to an obvious critique: What exactly is the ‘reason’ of these impartial agencies to look like? Can a body charged with political power ever be fully ‘reasonable’ or objective? And what if what is taken to be rational is actually an ideological mask concealing hidden relations of power? Democratic Legitimacydoes not provide any clear answers to these problems, nor does it offer any account of how ideology can operate at cross purposes to the ideals of democratic rule.

Instead, in describing how these new impartial institutions are to function, Rosanvallon draws upon an ideal-typical vision of the role rational bureaucracy once played in Western democracies – namely, as unbiased protector of the collective good against majoritarian tyranny and as embodiment of ‘objective administrative power’ (2011: 37). Now that state bureaucracies are no longer widely seen as legitimate, new impartial institutions are to inherit their role as guarantors of universalism and objectivity. One is immediately tempted to ask, though, whether state bureaucracies have ever fully embodied the rational objectivity Rosanvallon describes. Or is this merely taking the collective self-understanding of bureaucrats, as enlightened defenders of the public collective good, at face value? Is it not more likely that bureaucracy has actually functioned, in great part, to protect certain prerogatives and interests of the state? In which case, is it realistic to expect that new independent institutions and appendages of the state, charged with a special mission to obey ‘law and reason’, will actually be able and willing to do so? And who is to say that their particular visions of ‘law and reason’ are actually the best guarantor of the greater collective good?

Rosanvallon’s account of the institutions of ‘reflexive democracy’ is open to a similar critique. In particular, his vision for the special role to be played by judicial institutions does not account for the fact that the courts too can function to protect the narrow prerogatives of private bodies or of the state against the claims of the minorities that they are, on Rosanvallon’s view, intended to defend. One clear example of a recent judicial act entirely at odds with Rosanvallon’s vision for the judiciary is the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed for unlimited political spending by corporations during elections. In this instance, the Supreme Court decided precisely against the interests of those whose voices are not accounted for in the majoritarian electoral system, providing a means whereby powerful private bodies can further wrest control from individual citizens and civil society groups over the range of candidates and platforms that are electable at any given time. The transparency of the ideological motives behind the decision of the conservative members of the court in this case stretches Rosanvallon’s ideal of the court as impartial arbiter of the collective good to the breaking point. ⁸ His admission that Americans recognize that the Supreme Court ‘has in recent years become less objective and more partisan and that the justices are more inclined to pursue ideological goals’ seems a rather weak concession to this reality, given that Democratic Legitimacy offers no real account of how underlying structural forces in society distort the priorities of reflexive democratic institutions.

Finally, Rosanvallon’s depiction of the role citizen groups are to play in the oversight of democratic governance does not take into account how relations of power in society determine which civil society groups gain influence and which remain ineffectual. Indeed, Rosanvallon’s account of the ‘legitimacy of proximity’ does not offer an obvious way of accounting for what is perhaps the most telling example of politically-influential citizen mobilization against electoral government in recent years: namely, the Tea Party movement in the United States. (While generating enormous popular enthusiasm, the global Occupy Movements have, to date, had little success in implementing their political agendas at the party-political, legislative, or judicial levels.)

On the surface, the Tea Party, in the two years after the presidential election of 2008, displayed exactly the qualities that Rosanvallon admires in civil society groups: it was a highly participatory movement dedicated to protecting what it saw as the interests of those who felt unrepresented by the elected administration. Indeed, it took upon itself exactly what Rosanvallon has described as the proper role for citizen groups: the ‘oversight, obstruction, and judgment’ of elected officials and the state. In so doing, though, it managed to exhibit an outsized influence on setting the terms of public debate, due to its extensive funding by wealthy patrons and its guaranteed platform from which to broadcast its views in the ideologically-driven conservative media. Other groups performing ostensibly similar oversight functions – groups representing the interests of labor, for example, or of immigrants – have not had anywhere near the influence of the Tea Party in representing their interests over against the prerogatives of the state. And this is due, in great part, to the fact that they do not have equally powerful economic backers and as far-reaching and influential means of disseminating their views. Rosanvallon’s analysis does not account for how one counter-democratic group can capture so much power while others, performing ostensibly similar roles, cannot. And this is because, as argued above, Democratic Legitimacydoes not consider how power and ideology can function in democracies to further the interests of the few against those of the many.

This is all not to say that Rosanvallon’s call for the reinvention of democracy in the 21st century is not a compelling and much needed intervention in an important debate. And it is certainly the case that regulatory agencies, the courts, and citizen groups can achieve real victories for minority voices and the public good. But by refusing to acknowledge their mixed record, and the way in which these bodies can also function at cross-purposes to the emancipatory and participatory ideals they espouse, Rosanvallon’s theory leaves itself open to the critique that its realism is weakened by its ideal typicality. While Rosanvallon does admit in Democratic Legitimacythat his blueprint for 21st-century democracy is largely ideal typical, he also insists that it is realistic. But these two characterizations are at odds: how can a ‘realistic positive theory of democracy’ not take into account how the institutions it calls for may be unable to perform their intended roles in the arena of real politics? (Rosanvallon 2011: 221). Raymond Geuss’s well-known critique of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice applies equally well here: ‘one might find it highly peculiar to present what is supposed to be a reasonably full overview of any social and political system’, Geuss writes, ‘without giving any explicit attention to the relations of power that exist in that system, and the way power can influence thought, feeling, and valuation’ (Geuss 2008: 90–1). Instead of charting in detail these relations of power, and how they work to distort political participation and popular rule, Democratic Legitimacyoffers a vision of contemporary democracy in which all the structures necessary for the full realization of popular sovereignty are already in place: regulatory agencies, constitutional courts, citizen watchdog groups, and so on. ⁹ In reading Rosanvallon’s new book, one gets the sense that he has moved so far away from the language of political economy and ideology that he has swung perilously close to an opposite extreme: his overriding focus in this work on how to protect citizens from the electoral majority prevents him from commenting in depth on the world of narrow political and economic interests in which our democracies, sadly, continue to exist.