A Collège de France - CNED coproduction
Abstract
My ambition is to think about democracy in terms of its history. But it's important to make it clear at the outset that it's not just a question of saying that democracy has a history. More radically, democracy is a history. The object of the conceptual history of politics is to follow the thread of experience and trial and error, conflict and controversy, through which the city has sought to take legitimate form. By tracing the long genealogy of contemporary political issues, we can reconstruct the way in which individuals and groups have developed their understanding of situations, identify the challenges and attractions from which they have formulated their objectives, and trace the way in which their vision of the world has defined and organized the scope of their actions. It is therefore a history whose function is to reconstruct problems rather than to describe models. History conceived in this way is the working laboratory of our present, and not merely the illumination of its background. For this reason, attention to the most burning and pressing contemporary problems cannot be dissociated from a meticulous reconstruction of their genesis.
