Democracy Past and Future by Pierre Rosanvallon

Author:Pierre Rosanvallon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000, Philosophy/Political, POL010000, Political Science/History and Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2006-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Triple Utopia of Liberalism

This sketch, admittedly rapid, allows the problem of contemporary attitudes toward liberalism to be faced on a new basis. It is often marked by what appears to be a contradiction, or at least a tension, between a “political liberalism” grounded in the recognition of rights and the maintenance of pluralism, generally viewed positively, and an “economic liberalism” much more frequently held in suspicion. The way in which I have just proposed to think about liberalism allows the contrast to be framed in a different way. The market and the rule of law in effect participate in the same refusal: that of accepting a certain kind of institution of authority on individuals. In each domain, the same principle holds: that of individual autonomy, rooted in a denial of all absolute sovereignties. If there is a common plank that allows one to speak of liberalism in the singular, it is indeed this principle. There is thus no foundational difference between the philosophy of the rights of man, which drives political liberalism, and the belief found in economic liberalism in the organizing character of economic laws and constraints that order the market. In both cases, the presumption is that there is no great master of men and things, and no personal power of subjection is allowed to exist between individuals. The central site of power is called to remain empty by the refusal of all personal subordination and all collusion among men to restore unchosen obligations. “Representative government and the market,” Pierre Manent justly writes, “belong to one another and respond to one another. The individual does not win his liberty and emancipate himself from personalized rulers except by dividing his allegiance between these two impersonal authorities. In neither register does he obey anyone’s orders: the results of market allocation are not chosen by anyone, and the laws of the state are general laws that make no exceptions for anyone, and in any case thanks to political representation each person, along with everyone else, is their co-author.”3

The liberalism that arose in Europe beginning in the seventeenth century thus marks a new step in the relationship between the individual and authority. It furthered the process of political secularization and the affirmation of the preeminence of the individual that had been at work since the fourteenth century. It characterized a culture, in this sense, far more than it represented a specialized doctrine. Liberalism accompanied the entry of modern societies into a new era of representing the social bond, one grounded in utility and equality rather than the outmoded representation of society as a preexisting totality. Against the Rousseauean universe of the social contract, it is the expression of a criticism and subordination of the will. Liberalism, indissociably economic and political, made the depersonalization of the world the condition of progress and liberty. In his Political Essays, Hume, the greatest liberal thinker of the eighteenth century, takes this sentiment so far that he can praise habit and custom. So that order can

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