Pierre Rosanvallon is one of today’s most important and diverse political thinkers. In addition to the position of Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), he has held the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History of Politics at the Collège de France since 2001. He also plays a leading role in the political debate, for instance through the think-tank La République des Idées, established in 2002, to which the website La Vie des Idées (www.laviedesidees.fr) was added in 2007.
Since the seventies, Rosanvallon has published much-discussed work on the theory and history of democracy, French political history, the role of the state, and the question of social justice in contemporary society.
In recent years, he has established an international reputation with La contre-démocratie. La politique à l’âge de la défiance (Seuil 2006; in English: Counter-Democracy. Politics in an age of distrust, Cambridge University Press 2008) and La Légitimité démocratique. Impartialité, réflexivité, proximité (2008, in English: Democratic legitimacy: impartiality, reflexivity, proximity, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2011). The study La Société des égaux (Seuil 2011) is his most recent work.
