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Save households to save banks could then have multiple benefitsThe run on small models was almost general4 billion funded by public and private fundsCredit to individuals him increased by 3It requests the Government to address themHBOS the fourth Bank in the country provides also beat forecasts And for the time being the HRD in the FordWe are not completely at the end of the pathAn idea of what happens inside is given outsideA decision made Sunday afternoon with the ElyseeDEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY
by Pierre Rosanvallon
Threshold, 379 pages, 21 euros.
Two reasons are required to push all those who are questioning the future of democracy to read the last book of Pierre Rosanvallon. First, it offers us, even if other it have already attempted, an explanation of the disillusionment experienced by citizens of democratic regimes unable to respond to the hopes they had raised. Then, more original, he turned to the future and began to identify the emergence of new forms that might be the broadening and deepening of democracy. A fortifying book who is not happy in the denunciation of the shortcomings of democratic regimes but we invite to collect an extraordinary movement of democratization, which continues to exceed its initial weaknesses.
It is impossible to understand the changes taking place if it has not first identified what is the origin of the current crisis. Pierre Rosanvallon offers a diagnosis of a cruel simplicity: our belief in the virtues of democracy is based on a fiction. It is equivalent to assuming that the election would express a general desire and that the people could, through its representatives, effectively exercise the power. Is to ignore that a majority is never just a fraction of the people. The time has come where this fictional collapses, where it continued to believe that a majoritarian electoral system could express the general interest.
The features of age
The other fiction that collapsed is that of a society that would form a whole sufficiently homogenous that it governs the general laws. The welfare state well embodied this vision. However, any modern sociology shows us that we live in the age of the features. Modern society is made only of minorities who find temporary alliances to form majorities. But, according to a formula of Benjamin Constant, "give the majority a unlimited authority, provide the people in mass Holocaust of the people in detail". In this new society, the democratic legitimacy requires other grounds.
The admirable is no doubt that the nations, far from giving up freedom and equality, have constantly sought ways to alleviate the shortcomings of representative democracy. It is an inventory of this quest is devoted the bulk of this book. The author goes here the approach initiated in his previous book, "The Contre-démocratie". It is showed how political activity is not reduced to that of the "voter people", but is also the fact of "people supervisor or people's justice". It expands the perspective by highlighting which serves as a guideline number of innovations. They were first increased research of impartiality that led, for example, to create independent authorities of universal suffrage and loaded to define the general interest in a specific area. A second trend is to submit the institutions to the control of agencies such as the constitutional courts, which increase the sources of definition of democratic legitimacy. The third major trend is pushing governments and administrations with a proximity policy that takes into account the particularities. The many initiatives, often affublées for the appellations of democracy "participatory" or "deliberative" illustrate this aspiration to democracy based on a permanent interaction.
Without suggesting drafting a manual of constitutional engineering, Pierre Rosanvallon seeks to capture the thread of the transformations underway. Three words clearly expressed: complication, gear, offset. In other words, must be abandoned to an approach which makes the representation election the only pillar of a democratic system. The imperative is to admit a plurality of institutions and approaches that complement. This plurality multiply opportunities for citizens to appropriate regimes that govern them. Rather than better as a defined state once and for all, democracy is realize that democratization is a never completed construction, always in motion.
