How did the enthusiasms of May 68 give way to the disarray of the 1980s and 1990s and then to the fatalism that, since the 2000s, has blocked our political and intellectual horizon? Why did the left get bogged down in a realism of impotence or in radical postures, to the point of letting republican sovereignty and national-populism conquer minds?
Pierre Rosanvallon confronts these questions here in a dual manner. As a historian of ideas and a political philosopher, he seeks to re-inscribe the last fifty years in the long history of the modern project of emancipation, with its achievements, its unfulfilled promises and its regressions. But it is also as an actor and witness that he approaches the retrospective reading of the sequence of which May 68 symbolised the beginning. His personal journey, the intellectual and political enterprises that marked it and the personalities who accompanied it refer more broadly to the history of the second left, with which its trajectory has practically merged, and, beyond that, to that of the left in general, whose current agony comes from afar.
Through a sincere and lucid return to his journey, with its key ideas and doubts, its perplexities and blind spots, it is a political and intellectual history of the present that Pierre Rosanvallon retraces, in terms that lead to sketching new perspectives for the ideal of emancipation.
Pierre Rosanvallon is a professor at the Collège de France. From the Age of Self-Management (1976) to Good Government (2015), he is the author of numerous works which occupy a major place in contemporary political theory and reflection on democracy and the social question.
