Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies. by Enrique Peruzzoti and Catalina Smulovitz (original) (raw)

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