In his new volume, the historian Pierre Rosanvallon argues that, far from being self-evident, the relationship between democratic ideals and the precise origin of democratic institutions' legitimacy is continually fraught. In constructing a genealogy of democratic legitimacy, he works to reveal the complicated and often counterintuitive origins of democratic legitimation, and identifies important ways in which democratic legitimacy continues to change today.

Rosanvallon begins by noting that “the idea that the people are the sole legitimate source of power has come to be taken for granted.” However, “the transition from the celebration of the People or the Nation, always in the singular, to majority rule is anything but self-evident.” He demonstrates that while the aim and aspiration of democracy has always been the “expression of social generality,” or the constitution and exercise of power by and for the people, there has been a continual historical evolution in its expression. If at one point generality could be understood simply in terms of “general will” and “general interest” as expressed by a relatively unanimous electoral mandate, by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century a crisis of legitimacy had developed as partisanship and plurality made these notions increasingly untenable. Mere majoritarian-electoral legitimacy seemed insufficiently democratic. The system of legitimacy that then emerged in the democratic world in the early twentieth century and solidified in the postwar period was one of “dual legitimacy”: the legitimacy of an increasingly universalized election process complemented by an unelected bureaucracy meant to continually administrate and regulate in the interest of the people.

Over the course of the later twentieth century, Rosanvallon argues, the system of dual legitimacy began to unravel, and many were left with “a powerful sense of loss or even decay.” He sees in this change a fundamental shift from the “democracy of identification” to the “democracy of approbation”: that is, people can no longer identify and thus legitimize their leaders purely through notions of electoral mandate and the bureaucracy. As the democracy of identification has given way to the politics of approbation, there has been a proliferation of alternative mechanisms and institutions that work to compensate for this inevitable “distance between leaders and the people.” Rosanvallon identifies civil activism, indirect democratic institutions (such as “oversight bodies, regulatory agencies, and constitutional courts”), and popular expectations of democratic conduct as three developments in this direction. In these ways citizens have incorporated notions of impartiality, reflexivity, and proximity as simultaneous requisites for democratic legitimacy. Rosanvallon further argues that it is essential that we work such notions into any substantive theory of democracy and democratic legitimacy.