From this period onwards, Pierre Rosanvallon's work was organized around three poles. Firstly, the history of the French political model, with a series of works devoted to the history of liberalism in the first half of the 19th^century , following on from his Moment Guizot, then two "programmatic" works: L'État en France, de 1789 à nos jours (1990) and Le Modèle politique français. La société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (2004). In La Crise de l'État-providence (1981) and La Nouvelle question sociale, repenser l'État-providence (1995), he sets out to interpret the evolution of institutions of solidarity and theories of justice. But the most important aspect of his work, from the early 1990s onwards, was the launch of a vast project aimed at tracing the intellectual history of democracy in France. Three volumes published in the "Bibliothèque des histoires" by Gallimard present the results of this research: Le Sacre du citoyen. Histoire du suffrage universel en France (1992), Le Peuple introuvable. Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (1998) and La Démocratie inachevée. Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (2000).

In 2001, Pierre Rosanvallon was elected Professor at the Collège de France, holding the chair of Modern and Contemporary History of Politics. Having completed his previous research on the history of the French political model, he then turned his attention to historical and theoretical work on the mutations of contemporary democracy. La Contre-Démocratie. La politique à l'âge de la défiance (2006), La Légitimité démocratique: impartialité, réflexivité, proximité (2008), then La Société des égaux (2011) constitute the first three volumes of this new undertaking. A fourth volume, currently in preparation, will be released in 2015. In these latest works, he has extended his thinking beyond the French case, engaging in a systematically comparative approach. He outlined the perspectives of this comparatism in his article "Les Universalismes démocratiques: histoire et problèmes"(Esprit, January 2008). Pierre Rosanvallon also published "Le Parlement des invisibles" in 2014.

In his opening lecture at the Collège de France, he presented the originality of his approach: considering the history of democracy as that of a problematic experience. Democracy, he emphasized, constitutes a wide-open field of politics, due to the tensions and uncertainties that underlie it. " Because it is the foundation of an experience of freedom, the history of democracy is not just the history of a thwarted experiment or a betrayed utopia: it is also the history of disenchantment and the history of indeterminacy . This conception of politics led Pierre Rosanvallon to make a historical approach the condition for its full grasp. His ambition has been to think democracy through its history. At the same time, he made it clear that it was not simply a question of saying that democracy had a history, but that it was, more radically, a history. A history conceived as the active laboratory of our present, and not merely the illumination of its background. He set out the principles of this approach in Pour une histoire conceptuelle du politique (2003).

This approach to history as the subject of political theory helps us to understand how Pierre Rosanvallon links his academic work to a constant preoccupation with the urgencies of the present. In addition to writing his own books, he has never ceased to be involved in the community, seeking to shed light on current affairs through the contributions of the social sciences. From 1982 to 1999, he headed the Fondation Saint-Simon, a reform-minded think-tank whose publications left their mark on the times. In 2002, he launched La République des idées, which publishes an eponymous collection with Éditions du Seuil and regularly organizes major citizens' forums. He also launched laviedesidees.fr, a magazine providing analysis and information on the debate on ideas and intellectual production in France and abroad, as well as its English-language version Booksandideas.net, which is attached directly to his chair. In January 2014, he launched the citizens' initiative "Raconter la vie" with the publication of a collection of books with the eponymous title and a website.

Pierre Rosanvallon's work has been translated into twenty-two languages and published in twenty-six countries. As well as teaching in France, he gives lectures and conferences at universities around the world (see his annual activity reports).