Democracy Past and Future

This book is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon's most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life. Rosanvallon proposes new readings of the history, aims, and possibilities of democratic theory and practice and provides unique theoretical understandings of key moments in democracy's trajectory, from the French Revolution and the struggles for universal suffrage to European unification and the crises of the present. In so doing, he lays out an influential new theory of how to write the history of politics. Rosanvallon's historical and philosophical approach examines the "pathologies" that have curtailed democracy's potential and challenges the antitotalitarian liberalism that has dominated recent political thought. He adroitly combines historical and theoretical analysis with an insistence on the need for a new form of democracy and ultimately asks what democracy means when the people who rule are nowhere to be found.