One of France's leading political theorists and historians, Pierre Rosanvallon played a key role in what came to be known as the Second Left, and has spent most of his distinguished academic career rethinking the history of democracy in France. Under the guidance of Claude Lefort and François Furet, Rosanvallon learned to transcend intellectual fashions, reviving interest in a study of “the political” that moves beyond the mere functioning of politics.

Edited by Samuel Moyn, this book brings together most of Rosanvallon's important essays on the historical evolution of democracy in France. It ends with a postscript written specially for this collection, in which the author discusses the mixed political regime of the moderns and analyzes the main elements of what he calls “indirect democracy.” The selected essays cover five major topics: the study of politics in history, democracy and the drive to unity, political rationalism in France, civil society, and the future of democracy. The topics of these essays are judiciously chosen to reflect both the diversity and unity of his work. The English reader would have benefited from the inclusion of another significant text of Rosanvallon on the history of the idea of democracy, a good example of both conceptual history and political theory at their best (an English version of this text was originally published in the Journal of Democracy in 1995).

Democracy Past and Future will appeal to a wide audience of political theorists interested in the future of democracy and liberalism, and will be of special interest to scholars of representative government and modern French thought. Through its own brand of progressive politics, this book can speak to those on the Left who seek new possibilities for expanding the empire of democracy in the modern world. But some of Rosanvallon's ideas can also appeal to those on the Right who, concerned with the attrition of the political in modern society, search for an alternative to the predominantly legalistic and normative approach pioneered by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and their disciples.

The first two methodological essays in this collection shed fresh light on Rosanvallon's approach. His aim is to write a new history of the political, defined simultaneously as a field and an always contentious project (or process), through which the explicit or implicit rules of a particular community are elaborated. As a field, the political designates “the site where the multiple threads of the lives of men and women come together” (p. 34). Yet this definition risks conflating the political and the social, while insisting on the interdependence among the economic, social, political, and cultural spheres. Preferring to refer to “the political” rather than to politics, the author claims that in a democratic society, the political is an essentially open and uncertain field, whose indeterminacy reminds us of democracy's equivocations and tensions.

Inspired by nineteenth-century historians such as François Guizot and Edgar Quinet, Rosanvallon has an ambitious goal: the writing of a “global” or comprehensive history that links political reflection on the present to the comprehension of the past. Rosanvallon believes that in order to give depth to political analysis, attention to contemporary problems can (and should) never be dissociated from the investigation of their historical origins. This belief underlies his investigation of rationalism as the cornerstone of democracy in France (pp. 117–43) and the complex relationship among market, democracy, and civil society (pp. 147–86). The author rethinks democracy by following the thread of its history as it has been spun. In other words, the main goal of the history of the political is to follow the trials and errors, the conflicts and controversies through which individuals sought to improve their condition and justify the legitimacy of the institutions under which they lived.

Rosanvallon's history of the political draws on various resources from social history, political sociology, political theory, and intellectual history. His focus on France and the legacy of the French Revolution ought to be seen as “a point of entry into the general problematic of democracy rather than a treatment of a nation as an end in itself” (p. 245). In “Political Rationalism and Democracy in France” (pp. 127–43), he shows how the history of democracy in France, with all its equivocations, was marked from the outset by the limits of democratic voluntarism and political rationalism. Few cases illustrate better the original path of French liberalism than the career and writings of Guizot, the subject of Rosanvallon's important book Le Moment Guizot (1985).

How does Rosanvallon's project compare with those of other contemporary political theorists, such as Rawls, Habermas, Michel Foucault, Leo Strauss, and Quentin Skinner? If, for Rawls, political theory is a means to formalize reality, Rosanvallon's historical approach respects the complexity and antinomies of political reality, rather than hoping to eliminate them through an imposition of normativity. In his view, Foucault remained “prisoner of an excessively narrow approach to the phenomena of power” (p. 75) and determination. Contrary to what Foucault believed, not only is the political field organized by determined forces, but it is also the territory of open and unpredictable experimentation and exploration. Furthermore, contrary to the classical history of ideas, Rosanvallon's history of the political does not limit itself to a commentary upon the great texts. Drawing inspiration from the history of mentalities, it takes into account other important sources, such as the press, public opinion, parliamentary speeches, and so forth. Ideas, mentalities, institutions, and events are studied together in an effort to shed light on the “historical nodes around which new political and social rationalities organize themselves and representations of public life undergo change” (p. 62). At the same time, his approach differs from that of the Cambridge School insofar as his philosophical history of the political refrains from dismissing all arguments about the timelessness of philosophical quandaries.

In spite of Rosanvallon's claim that his project amounts to writing a “philosophical” history of the political, philosophy does not seem to loom large on his agenda. His analysis of modernity significantly differs from that of Pierre Manent, whose sources of inspiration are Tocqueville, Montesquieu, and Strauss. Furthermore, one might be surprised by the absence of any substantive references to Raymond Aron. This oversight might be explained by the fact that Aron espoused a different view of the political that drew a clearer dividing line between the political and the social; moreover, he did not go as far as Rosanvallon to stress the openness and indeterminacy of the political. It should not be forgotten that Aron was a critic of the 1968 revolutionary moment whose ideas exercised an important influence on Rosanvallon and Lefort.

It is refreshing that Rosanvallon's history of the political offers no recipe that can be mechanically applied, and that he conceives academic life in such a way that it becomes an integral part of the civic experience broadly defined. The contemporary ramifications of his philosophical history of the political center around the notion of “indirect democracy” (p. 244) and seek to repoliticize democracy by securing “powerful new arms for the critique of democracy” (p. 249). A committed observer, he seeks “to heal the division between political theory and political history, so as to arrive at a point at which the two enterprises fuse” (p. 67). Through his own historical forays, he offers “instruments of understanding and tools for practical involvement” (p. 71) that suggest the possibility of a new relation between erudition and civic involvement, between intellectual labor and political life. Rosanvallon's work amounts to an elegant invitation to rediscover the virtues of a historically minded political theory that pays respectful attention to the past and follows attentively the contours of reality.