Samuel Moyn: Interviewed About French Thinker Pierre Rosanvallon
... Democracy Past and Future, the selection of [French Thinker Pierre Rosanvallon's] writings just published by Columbia University Press, provides a long overdue introduction to a figure who defies both sound bites and the familiar academic division of labor. Born in 1948, he spent much of the 1970s as a sort of thinker-in-residence for a major trade union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, for which he organized seminars and conferences seeking to create a non-Marxist “second left” within the Socialist Party. He emerged as a theoretical voice of the autogestion (self-management) movement. His continuing work on the problem of democracy was honored in 2001 when he became a professor at the Collège de France, where Rosanvallon lectures on the field he calls “the philosophical history of the political.”
Rosanvallon has written about the welfare state. Still, he isn’t really engaged in political science. He closely studies classical works in political philosophy — but in a way that doesn’t quite seem like intellectual history, since he’s trying to use the ideas as much as analyze them. He has published a study of the emergence of universal suffrage that draws on social history. Yet his overall project — that of defining the essence of democracy — is quite distinct from that of most social historians. At the same time (and making things all the more complicated) he doesn’t do the kind of normative political philosophy one now associates with John Rawls or Jurgen Habermas.
Intrigued by a short intellectual autobiography that Rosanvallon presented at a conference a few years ago, I was glad to see the Columbia volume, which offers a thoughtful cross-section of texts from the past three decades. The editor, Samuel Moyn, is an assistant professor of history at Columbia. He answered my questions on Rosanvallon by e-mail.
Q:Rosanvallon is of the same generation as BHL. They sometimes get lumped together. Is that inevitable? Is it misleading?
A: They are really figures of a different caliber and significance, though you are right to suggest that they lived through the same pivotal moment. Even when he first emerged, Bernard-Henri Lévy faced doubts that he mattered, and a suspicion that he had fabricated his own success through media savvy. One famous thinker asked whether the “new philosophy” that BHL championed was either new or philosophy; and Cornelius Castoriadis attacked BHL and others as “diversionists.” Yet BHL drew on some of the same figures Rosanvallon did — Claude Lefort for example — in formulating his critique of Stalinist totalitarianism. But Lefort, like Castoriadis and Rosanvallon himself, regretted the trivialization that BHL’s meteoric rise to prominence involved.
So the issue is what the reduction of the era to the “new philosophy” risks missing. In retrospect, there is a great tragedy in the fact that BHL and others constructed the “antitotalitarian moment” (as that pivotal era in the late 1970s is called) in a way that gave the impression that a sententious “ethics” and moral vigilance were the simple solution to the failures of utopian politics. And of course BHL managed to convince some people — though chiefly in this country, if the reception of his recent book is any evidence — that he incarnated the very “French intellectual” whose past excesses he often denounced.
In the process, other visions of the past and future of the left were ignored. The reception was garbled — but it is always possible to undo old mistakes. I see the philosophy of democracy Rosanvallon is developing as neither specifically French nor of a past era. At the same time, the goal is not to substitute a true philosopher for a false guru. The point is to use foreign thinkers who are challenging to come to grips with homegrown difficulties.
Q:Rosanvallon’s work doesn’t fit very well into some of the familiar disciplinary grids. One advantage of being at the Collège de France is that you get to name your own field, which he calls “the philosophical history of the political.” But where would he belong in terms of the academic terrain here?
A: You’re right. It’s plausible to see him as a trespasser across the various disciplinary boundaries. If that fact makes his work of potential interest to a great many people — in philosophy, politics, sociology, and history — it also means that readers might have to struggle to see that the protocols of their own disciplines may not exhaust all possible ways of studying their questions.
But it is not as if there have not been significant interventions in the past — from Max Weber for example, or Michel Foucault in living memory — that were recognized as doing something relevant to lots of different existing inquiries. In fact, that point suggests that it may miss the point to try to locate such figures on disciplinary maps that are ordinarily so useful. If I had to sum up briefly what Rosanvallon is doing as an intellectual project, I would say that the tradition of which he’s a part — which includes his teacher Lefort as well as some colleagues like Marcel Gauchet and others — is trying to replace Marxism with a convincing alternative social theory.
Most people write about Marxism as a political program, and of course any alternative to it will also have programmatic implications. But Marxism exercised such appeal because it was also an explanatory theory, one that claimed, by fusing the disciplines, to make a chaotic modern history — and perhaps history as a whole — intelligible. Its collapse, as Lefort’s own teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly saw, threatened to leave confusion in its wake, unless some alternative to it is available. (Recall Merleau-Ponty’s famous proclamation: “Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history, and to renounce it is to dig the grave of reason in history.")
Rosanvallon seems to move about the disciplines because, along with others in the same school, he has been trying to put together a total social theory that would integrate all the aspects of experience into a convincing story. They call the new overall framework they propose “the political,” and Rosanvallon personally has focused on making sense of democratic modernity in all its facets. Almost no one I know about in the Anglo-American world has taken up so ambitious and forbidding a transdisciplinary task, but it is a highly important project....
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
Rosanvallon has written about the welfare state. Still, he isn’t really engaged in political science. He closely studies classical works in political philosophy — but in a way that doesn’t quite seem like intellectual history, since he’s trying to use the ideas as much as analyze them. He has published a study of the emergence of universal suffrage that draws on social history. Yet his overall project — that of defining the essence of democracy — is quite distinct from that of most social historians. At the same time (and making things all the more complicated) he doesn’t do the kind of normative political philosophy one now associates with John Rawls or Jurgen Habermas.
Intrigued by a short intellectual autobiography that Rosanvallon presented at a conference a few years ago, I was glad to see the Columbia volume, which offers a thoughtful cross-section of texts from the past three decades. The editor, Samuel Moyn, is an assistant professor of history at Columbia. He answered my questions on Rosanvallon by e-mail.
Q:Rosanvallon is of the same generation as BHL. They sometimes get lumped together. Is that inevitable? Is it misleading?
A: They are really figures of a different caliber and significance, though you are right to suggest that they lived through the same pivotal moment. Even when he first emerged, Bernard-Henri Lévy faced doubts that he mattered, and a suspicion that he had fabricated his own success through media savvy. One famous thinker asked whether the “new philosophy” that BHL championed was either new or philosophy; and Cornelius Castoriadis attacked BHL and others as “diversionists.” Yet BHL drew on some of the same figures Rosanvallon did — Claude Lefort for example — in formulating his critique of Stalinist totalitarianism. But Lefort, like Castoriadis and Rosanvallon himself, regretted the trivialization that BHL’s meteoric rise to prominence involved.
So the issue is what the reduction of the era to the “new philosophy” risks missing. In retrospect, there is a great tragedy in the fact that BHL and others constructed the “antitotalitarian moment” (as that pivotal era in the late 1970s is called) in a way that gave the impression that a sententious “ethics” and moral vigilance were the simple solution to the failures of utopian politics. And of course BHL managed to convince some people — though chiefly in this country, if the reception of his recent book is any evidence — that he incarnated the very “French intellectual” whose past excesses he often denounced.
In the process, other visions of the past and future of the left were ignored. The reception was garbled — but it is always possible to undo old mistakes. I see the philosophy of democracy Rosanvallon is developing as neither specifically French nor of a past era. At the same time, the goal is not to substitute a true philosopher for a false guru. The point is to use foreign thinkers who are challenging to come to grips with homegrown difficulties.
Q:Rosanvallon’s work doesn’t fit very well into some of the familiar disciplinary grids. One advantage of being at the Collège de France is that you get to name your own field, which he calls “the philosophical history of the political.” But where would he belong in terms of the academic terrain here?
A: You’re right. It’s plausible to see him as a trespasser across the various disciplinary boundaries. If that fact makes his work of potential interest to a great many people — in philosophy, politics, sociology, and history — it also means that readers might have to struggle to see that the protocols of their own disciplines may not exhaust all possible ways of studying their questions.
But it is not as if there have not been significant interventions in the past — from Max Weber for example, or Michel Foucault in living memory — that were recognized as doing something relevant to lots of different existing inquiries. In fact, that point suggests that it may miss the point to try to locate such figures on disciplinary maps that are ordinarily so useful. If I had to sum up briefly what Rosanvallon is doing as an intellectual project, I would say that the tradition of which he’s a part — which includes his teacher Lefort as well as some colleagues like Marcel Gauchet and others — is trying to replace Marxism with a convincing alternative social theory.
Most people write about Marxism as a political program, and of course any alternative to it will also have programmatic implications. But Marxism exercised such appeal because it was also an explanatory theory, one that claimed, by fusing the disciplines, to make a chaotic modern history — and perhaps history as a whole — intelligible. Its collapse, as Lefort’s own teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty clearly saw, threatened to leave confusion in its wake, unless some alternative to it is available. (Recall Merleau-Ponty’s famous proclamation: “Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history, and to renounce it is to dig the grave of reason in history.")
Rosanvallon seems to move about the disciplines because, along with others in the same school, he has been trying to put together a total social theory that would integrate all the aspects of experience into a convincing story. They call the new overall framework they propose “the political,” and Rosanvallon personally has focused on making sense of democratic modernity in all its facets. Almost no one I know about in the Anglo-American world has taken up so ambitious and forbidding a transdisciplinary task, but it is a highly important project....