From solidarity to social inclusion: the political transformations of Durkheimianism

Pierre Rosanvallon holds the chair of modern history and contemporary politics at the Collège de France, Paris. In 2004 he published Le Modèle politique français, subtitled ‘La société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours’[civil society against jacobinism from 1789 to the present]. I begin by summarising and scrutinising Rosanvallon’s account of French political history since the Revolution. This tends towards a critical account of his thesis, seeing it as representative of a partisan political position of the end of the 20th century. In the process of making this argument, I seek to raise questions for further investigation about the historical relations between social scientific analysis, academic philosophy, and the advancement of social movements as subversive of dominant political discourse.