Pierre Rosanvallon
Counter-democracy. Politics in an age of mistrust
The democratic ideal now reigns unchallenged, but the regimes that lay claim to it are widely criticized. The erosion of trust in representatives is one of the major problems of our time. However, while citizens are less frequent visitors to the ballot box, they have not become passive : we see them demonstrating in the streets, protesting, mobilizing on the Internet... To understand this new citizen Janus, this book proposes to apprehend the mechanisms of the institution of trust and the social expression of distrust as two distinct spheres and moments in the life of democracies. Electoral-representative activity is organized around the first dimension : this is the one that has been classically studied. But the second has never been systematically explored.
This is what Pierre Rosanvallon sets out to do, by proposing a history and theory of the structuring role of mistrust in democracies. This radical reversal of perspective leads us to explore a political continent that has long gone unnoticed : that of the " counter-democracy ". The latter is the result of a set of practices of surveillance, prevention and judgment, through which society exercises its powers of correction and pressure. Alongside the people-voter, it gives voice and face to the figures of a people-vigilant, a people-veto and a people-judge. This is its virtue, but also its problem. For, by overemphasizing the control and resistance properties of public space, it can also play into the hands of populism and the " impolitique ", hindering the positive formulation of a common world.
Rosanvallon P., La Contre-démocratie. La politique à l'âge de la défiance, Paris, Édition du Seuil, coll. " Les livres du nouveau monde ", 2006.
