Mirrors of Time: Political Historiography and Democratic Theory in Pierre Rosanvallon’s work

Abstract

The conceptual history of politics presented by Pierre Rosanvallon combines a thesis of the unprecedented present time and an affirmation of historiography as a method for deciphering and conceptualizing changes in contemporary democracies. This article analyzes, through a comparison between the formal-methodological and the substantive dimensions of his work, how the use of historical narrative is articulated with a theory of contemporary democratic changes. We hypothesize that such articulation is anchored in a philosophy of political modernity expressed in the form of “perennial aporias” and in a historical narrative based on the notion of double temporality.