Honorary professor at the College de France, where he holds the chair of modern and contemporary political history, Pierre Rosanvallon does not have the classic academic career followed by many intellectuals. After graduating from HEC in 1969, he got involved in trade unionism by becoming an economic adviser to the CFDT, then political adviser to Edmond Maire and editor-in-chief of the magazine CFDT-Today (1973-1977). In the 1970s, he contributed, with The age of self-management (Threshold, 1976) and For a new political culture (1977), to define the intellectual corpus of the “second left”, embodied in the political world by Michel Rocard.
At the end of the 1970s, Pierre Rosanvallon joined the academic world – first at the University of Paris-Dauphine, where he led the sociological pole of the Labor and Society research center created by Jacques Delors, then, in the early 1980s, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His work focuses in particular on the intellectual history of French democracy, to which he devotes a trilogy – The Sacred Citizen. History of universal suffrage in France (Gallimard, 1992), The Untraceable People. History of democratic representation in France (Gallimard, 1998) and Unfinished Democracy. History of the sovereignty of the people in France (Gallimard, 2000).
Criticism of populism
Since his election to the Collège de France in 2001, Pierre Rosanvallon has published a new trilogy devoted, this time, to the changes in contemporary democracy – Counter-Democracy. Politics in the Age of Defiance (Threshold, 2006), Democratic Legitimacy. Impartiality, reflexivity, proximity (Threshold, 2008), The Society of Equals (Seuil, 2011) – as well as a work devoted to the history, theory and critique of populism. In his latest book, The trials of life. Understand the French differently (Seuil, 2021), he explores how the emotions forged in “trials” – resentment, anger, fear – now structure conflict, as evidenced by the movement of “yellow vests” or #metoo.
To these research works have always been added political commitments in the public debate. In 1982, he created, with the historian François Furet, the Saint-Simon Foundation, a place which he defines as a “totally independent space for social exchange and intellectual production, different from both political clubs and academic institutions”. Twenty years later, in 2002, he launched The Republic of Ideas, a “intellectual workshop” which publishes, in co-edition with Editions du Seuil, a collection of essays now edited by the historian Ivan Jablonka, as well as an online journal on international intellectual life named The life of ideas.