From Self-Management to Management: Pierre Rosanvallon's Bureaucratic Turn

Abstract

In his most recent work, Rosanvallon is attempting to understand democratic legitimacy in the context of the crisis of representation. The idea that electoral-representative functions increasingly need to be complemented by other modes of legitimation provides the premise of Democratic Legitimacy. Rosanvallon seeks to identify these supporting governing relationships, which he finds within nonelective institutions of “proximity, impartiality, and reflexivity.” According to him, the institutions of indirect democracy have become increasingly important since the 1980s, but they have been undertheorized and have thus failed to find their place in the democratic repertoire. If we can recognize the institutions of “indirect democracy” as serving democratic functions, he believes, we can revive political discourse in these spaces and fight against the depoliticizing tendencies of these presumably passive modes of public life. Here, as in his previous work Counter-Democracy, Rosanvallon exhorts the reader to adopt the view that citizen engagement has not dissipated, but taken on different forms.

Keywords: Pierre Rosanvallon, bureaucracy, technocracy, democratic legitimacy, legitimacy, regulation, regulatory authorities