Stephen W. Sawyer

An American Model for French Liberalism: The State of Exception in Édouard Laboulaye’s Constitutional Thought*

Liberal analyses of the American and French states have remained decidedly in Alexis de Tocqueville’s thrall, building on his assessment that the weak American state was both antithetical to and a potential antidote for overbearing French statism. Such studies have been rooted in the conviction that Tocqueville was the greatest liberal critic of American democracy, the observer whose reflections were the key to understanding its illustrative power for French and European politics. Historians and political scientists have paid decidedly less attention,

The Search Continues

We would like to begin by thanking Julian Bourg, James Chappel, Hugo Drochon and Helena Rosenblatt for their participation and insightful comments in this forum on our book, In Search of the Libera...

Introduction: New Perspectives on France’s “Liberal Moment”

In 1994, the American historian of ideas Mark Lilla published an article on the postwar recovery of liberal democracy in continental Western Europe that presented an unorthodox take on the idea of French exceptionalism.1 This recovery, he argued, had been the product of history, chance, shrewd political judgment, and the influence of the United States; it was decidedly not the homegrown product of the postwar European mind. Recently, however, France had emerged as the only continental European nation to have finally broken free of its illiberal intellectual history, confirming the Italian historian Guido de Ruggiero’s prediction that the liberal spirit would one day find a home on the continent. Few would have been more surprised at this development than de Ruggiero himself, who in 1925 had remarked of contemporary French democracy that it was “utterly unable to grasp the idea of moral liberty, the value of personality, and the capacity of the individual to react upon his environment.”2

Epilogue: Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Democratic Theory

How might we understand the ostensible renaissance of French liberal thought in the 1970s? Even the most cursory glance into modern French history troubles the waters of a supposed “revival”: Condorcet drafted a constitution in 1793; Benjamin Constant prepared the constitution for Napoleon’s 100 days; Adolphe Thiers and Francois Guizot governed for the better portion of the July Monarchy from 1830–1848; Tocqueville participated in French colonial strategy as well as the constitutional convention of 1848; the Second Empire ended as the “Liberal Empire” in 1870; writing in the 1860s, Prevost-Paradol penned one the most influential texts on the institutional structure of the Third Republic and Edouard Laboulaye presented an early version of the founding amendment of the Third Republic; some five decades later, the “Colloque Lippmann” in the interwar years established an agenda for an entire generation and beyond, while Elie Halevy maintained an intellectual project that nourished Raymond Aron, Francois Furet, and others.

Civic and Arts Activities can Energize Politics, France and Europe

Abstract This chapter is one of the first to analyze how local culture – especially voluntary associations and public arts activities – can mobilize citizens and increase voter turnout. This general hypothesis is contextualized by contrasting types of elections (French presidential vs. European Union) and types of art (contemporary, patrimonial, folkloric). We test these contextualized hypotheses by analyzing demographic, cultural, and political data from 263 French communes using linear regression methods. Civic associations and some arts activities seem to increase turnout in European but not presidential elections. Further, arts types vary in their association with voting for different parties. These findings suggest the importance of civic and arts activities for future analyses of voting turnout and party voting.

Reinterpreting Social Status

Social statuses existed before the social sciences. When scholars began to develop this concept in the nineteenth century, they were drawing on the juridical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, more broadly, the vocabulary used by social groups to define themselves across time and space. From this moment forward, social statuses occupied a central position in the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. These scholars were aiming to describe and explain the dynamics of human societies, but they also participated in framing the debates at the heart of the social sciences—as attested by the recurrent disputes between a Marxian notion of class and a Weberian conception of status groups, particularly among readers with tacit political motivations. Max Weber played a fundamental part in the success of the concept, taking the juridical aspect and the idea of society as a body, inherited from the ancien régime, and adding a specifically sociological content relating to the hierarchy of social prestige, which is neither directly inherited (as with castes) nor purely economic (as with classes). In truth, this definition was rarely applied stricto sensu by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but it did allow for the elaboration of a concept that could delimit groups of individuals sharing legal and symbolic characteristics within a given society, and that could incorporate the categories used by social actors themselves into historical analysis. Thus, during the 1960s, it was around the notion of status that interpretations of the ancien régime as a society of orders or a society of classes took shape, while anthropologists began to consider notions of emic and etic. From the 1980s, however, the concept of social status receded into the background as the idea of a global interpretation of society by the social sciences was called into question.