One of my tasks before teaching starts is to get through the pile of TLS's that have grown under my study coffee table over the past year or so. So as I read reviews or notions sparked by reviews that might be useful someday, I will list them here as a kind of memorandum.
1. Pierre Rosanvallon. Apparently in the school of François Furet and at one time linked to the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) a left-Catholic group. Any his argument is that an effective civil society has not been established in France because all sides (Liberals, Communists and even the Right) have, since the Jacobin moment, agreed on an ideology of universalism and a strong state as its bearer which have crowded out the kind of civil society that developed in Anglophone nation-states. This has meant that the official French discourses of republicanism: democratic and egalatarian have actually been supported by an autoritarian and anti-pluralist state.
(This came home to me today: the New York Times reports that the French government (Chirac) is thinking of rescinding a quite recent decree that made it illegal to teach negative views of the French colonialist legacy!)
Anyway according to the reviewer, Sudhir Hazaareesingh (TLS Sept 24 2004), Rosanvallon's best books are Le sacred du citoyen, Le Peuple introuvable and La Démocratie inachevée as well as his new one (in 2004!) Le modèle politique français.
This is interesting to me since I am thinking about the displacements involved in the translation of 'theory' from France to Britain and the US, and this background makes some sense of the specificity of figures like Barthes, Deleuze and Foucault who just dont have the kind of framework of thick liberal civil institutions to mediate between the state and the individual in their thinking.
The difficulty is: I really don't like the kind of revisionism that Furet in particular stood for. The French Revolution needs our support: at least from afar.