Author Meets Critics: Samuel Hayat, "Revolutionary Republicanism"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This panel brings together 5 leading scholars with Samuel Hayat for a discussion of his pathbreaking new book. The book returns to Spring 1848 in Paris, a brief period that saw an enormous number of innovations in democratic practice that challenge any simple dichotomy between “direct" and “representative" democracy. For a brief period, between February and May 1848, there proliferated multiple institutions, none based on elections, from which it was possible to speak and act in the name of the people: the "provisional government"; the "workers’ governmental commission"; the French National Guard, reorganized to welcome men of the working class; and a number of journals and clubs.


Hayat offers a richer treatment of this time than it receives in the important work of Pierre Rosanvallon, who regards it as merely transitional, a time between two relatively conservative instantiations of the French Republic. Hayat shows us that this was a critical moment for experiments in democratic representation that, more or less, became lost opportunities (in that, it is not unlike the Populist Movement in the late 1800’s in the US whose unique combination of political and economic democracy was overcome by Progressivism). He argues that this moment of democratic “experimentation" tested new ways of enacting liberty that were revolutionary in contrast to the previous regime. The book, then, grapples with one of the key questions of revolutionary politics that Hannah Arendt put so well: How do you migrate the "public happiness" that sparks the revolutionary moment over into institutional forms--without destroying everything that makes it revolutionary?

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Lisa J. Disch University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Presenters

• Cigdem Cidam Union College

• Vijay Phulwani University of Virginia

• Niklas Plaetzer University of Chicago

• Samuel Hayat Sciences Po

• Camila Vergara University of Essex