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Full Description
It's a commonplace that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But in Democratic Legitimacy, Pierre Rosanvallon, one of today's leading political thinkers, argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. He makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, Rosanvallon notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what Rosanvallon calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local.
To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. An original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy, this promises to be one of Rosanvallon's most important books.
Contents
Introduction: The Decentering of Democracies 1 Part One: Dual Legitimacy 15 Chapter One: The Legitimacy of Establishment 17 Chapter Two: The Legitimacy of Identification with Generality 33 Chapter Three: The Great Transformation 60 Part Two: The Legitimacy of Impartiality 73 Chapter Four: Independent Authorities: History and Problems 75 Chapter Five: The Democracy of Impartiality 87 Chapter Six: Is Impartiality Politics? 104 Part Three: Reflexive Legitimacy 121 Chapter Seven: Reflexive Democracy 123 Chapter Eight: The Institutions of Reflexivity 137 Chapter Nine: On the Importance of Not Being Elected 154 Part Four: The Legitimacy of Proximity 169 Chapter Ten: Attention to Particularity 171 Chapter Eleven: The Politics of Presence 187 Chapter Twelve: Interactive Democracy 203 Conclusion: The Democracy of Appropriation 219 Index 227
