Democratic Legitimacy (ebook)

Argumento de Democratic Legitimacy (ebook)

It's a commonplace that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But in Democratic Legitimacy, Pierre Rosanvallon, one of today's leading political thinkers, argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. He makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy.

Drawing on examples from France and the United States, Rosanvallon notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what Rosanvallon calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government.

An original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy, this promises to be one of Rosanvallon's most important books.

"An original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy, this promises to be one of Rosanvallon's most important books."--World Book Industry

"A historian and foremost theorist of democracy, Pierre Rosanvallon has produced another very insightful book, this time on the great variety of sources of democratic legitimation, and their evolving importance in contemporary society. This work casts fresh light on today's liberal democracies, and opens new potential avenues for their renewal. For those concerned about where our politics are heading, this book provides a penetrating historical analysis to make sense of it all, and perhaps also some new reasons to hope."--Charles Taylor, author of Multiculturalism and A Secular Age

"It is a cause for celebration when one of our most eminent theorists of democracy chooses to illuminate deep and stressful issues with rigor and originality. Probing tensions inherent in the distinction between majorities who decide and a more abstract people said to be sovereign, Pierre Rosanvallon identifies the inescapable contradictions inherent in different bases and forms of legitimacy, brilliantly showing why and how modern democracy is charged, fluid, and unsettled."--Ira Katznelson, coauthor of Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns

"This is a major work that deserves to have a large impact on current political theory, and its investigation of historical episodes of democratic legitimation make it of obvious interest to U.S. and European historians as well."--Samuel Moyn, Columbia University

"This is an important and unique work in the theory and history of democratic legitimacy. It is contextually situated but offers general propositions about the conditions, meaning, and institutional forms for democratic legitimacy in the twenty-first century."--Jean L. Cohen, Columbia University0Introduction: The Decentering of Democracies 1

Part One: Dual Legitimacy 15
Chapter One: The Legitimacy of Establishment 17
Chapter Two: The Legitimacy of Identification with Generality 33
Chapter Three: The Great Transformation 60

Part Two: The Legitimacy of Impartiality 73
Chapter Four: Independent Authorities: History and Problems 75
Chapter Five: The Democracy of Impartiality 87
Chapter Six: Is Impartiality Politics? 104

Part Three: Reflexive Legitimacy 121
Chapter Seven: Reflexive Democracy 123
Chapter Eight: The Institutions of Reflexivity 137
Chapter Nine: On the Importance of Not Being Elected 154

Part Four: The Legitimacy of Proximity 169
Chapter Ten: Attention to Particularity 171
Chapter Eleven: The Politics of Presence 187
Chapter Twelve: Interactive Democracy 203
Conclusion: The Democracy of Appropriation 219

Index 227