Stephen W Sawyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 291382 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen W Sawyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen W |
| FAMILY NAME | Sawyer |
| SIGNATURE | SAWYER S W |
| AFFILIATIONS | American University of Paris |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4453-0957 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 55 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Sovereignty and Government in the French Revolution
This article argues that while the instability and violence of the French Revolution has been overwhelmingly attributed to the transfer of unitary sovereignty from king to people, popular sovereignty was neither conceptually novel nor inherently destabilizing in 1789. We begin by drawing on early modern political theory, most importantly Bodin, d’Argenson and Rousseau, to argue that democracy was understood to be as much a form of government as a…
Globalizing Europe: A History
Globalizing Europe explores modern Europe's myriad entanglements with the wider world, considering the continent not only as an engine but also as a product of global transformations. It looks at the ways in which the global movements of peoples and ideas, goods and raw materials, flora and fauna have impacted life on the continent over the centuries. Bringing together a group of leading historians, the book shows how the history of Europe can be…
Explaining Gender Gap Variation in Political Science Knowledge Production
When we open a random political science journal, we have a roughly two-to-one chance that the article is written by a man. Beyond this general finding, we know little about the gender gaps within political science knowledge production: Are women more represented in lower- or higher-ranked journals? Do they publish more single-authored or multiauthored papers? Do they publish more content in some fields than in others? This article answers these q…
Active and Passive Citizens: A Defense of Majoritarian Democracy
Post Post-Cold War Democratic Theory
This article identifies three central axes in the contemporary constellation of democratic theory and practice: (1) redefining the roots of democratic power, or kratos, in response to new challenges to popular participation in democracy; (2) the rescaling of the demos given the growing dissatisfaction with liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global democracy; and (3) the de-parochialization of democracy within a multipolar world in light of democr…
Doubling Democracy
Autocracy Between Democratic Society and Democratic Government. Introduction
This introduction presents the articles of this special issue on democracy and autocracy, to explore how the contemporary push toward a more inclusive society of equals has been met with innovative strategies of autocratic power. Once again, we face the pressing question: how may our democratic societies combat autocracy by ensuring that we govern themselves democratically
Une histoire pragmatique du politique
Cet article propose quelques éléments pour penser une histoire pragmatique du politique en ouvrant un dialogue entre des interrogations propres à la pratique de l’histoire politique des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, principalement aux États-Unis et en France. Nous cherchons en particulier à souligner l’apport de l’histoire du droit (legal history) tel qu’il est pratiqué aux États-Unis dans le champ du legal realism pour nourrir notre réflexion sur …
State and Religion: The French Response to Jihadist Violence
The five acts of jihadist violence between 2012–2020, particularly the 2015 Paris attacks, combined with an increasingly polarized political discourse in France, have pushed jihadist extremism to the center of government policy and public opinion. Approaches to jihadist extremism in the last decade have comprised two characteristics: claims amalgamating Islam and Muslim religious practice—especially in its stricter forms—with extremist violence, …
Qu'est-ce que la démocratie critique
Face aux conceptions exclusiviste et idéaliste de la démocratie qui la réserveraient aux quelques pays où elle est née, il faut penser la démocratie comme capacité à gérer les contradictions. Elle génère des attentes qui la dépassent nécessairement, d'où son dynamisme
Sweet Land of Liberty: America in the Mind of the French Left, 1848-1871
Possibilidades De Uma História Pragmática Do Político / Possibilities of a Pragmatic History of the Political
Este ensaio consiste em uma tentativa inicial de propor um método que vem lentamente ganhando forma em nossas investigações individuais e colaborativas acerca da história da democracia nos Estados Unidos e na França. Nossa abordagem como um todo se baseia em diversas influências metodológicas, mas, neste ensaio em particular, destacamos apenas dois dos precedentes mais influentes do nosso trabalho: primeiro, a abordagem pragmático-hermenêutica ex…
France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History
A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been
What if history, as we know it, had run another course? Touching on alternate histories of the future and the past, or uchronias, this book encourages deeper consideration of watershed moments in the course of history. Wide-ranging in scope, it examines the Boxer Rebellion in China, the 1848 revolution in France, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and integrates science fiction, history, historiography, sociology, anthropo…
A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been
Déglobaliser l'histoire globale de l'Europe
Déglobaliser l'histoire globale de l'EuropeCet article soutient que les récentes histoires globales de l'Europe ne représentent qu'un mode très spécifique de conscience globale dans l'historiographie et les sciences sociales européennes. S'il ne fait aucun doute que notre compréhension du passé européen serait plus que desservie par un isolationnisme malvenu ou le simple rejet des considérables gains scientifiques de l'histoire globale, les récen…
Face au présent: Politique des temporalités
Face au présent: Politique des temporalités Cet article s’interroge sur les rapports entre les Annales et le présent et, à travers eux, sur la manière dont la revue prend en charge le politique et la pluralité des temporalités qu’il engage. Revue du contemporain, les Annales ne sont pas une revue d’histoire contemporaine, si l’on entend par là une période chronologique. Elles sont, en revanche, une revue du présent, d’un temps historique et épist…
The Forgotten Democratic Tradition of Revolutionary France
This article offers an interpretation of a key moment in the long history of democracy. Its hypothesis may be simply stated in the following terms: key political theorists and administrators in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France defined democracy as a means for solving public problems by the public itself. This conception of democracy focused on inventing effective practices of government, administrative intervention and regulatory p…
Epilogue: The Need for a New and Critical Democracy
Democratic critiques of neoliberalism have been comparatively rare, and positive democratic rejoinders to the social and political ruins of neoliberalism have been rarer. The question thus presents itself – what would an overtly democratic critique of neoliberalism look like and, beyond critique, what would a constructive democratic response to neoliberalism entail
Yves-Marie Péréon. Moralizing the Market: How Gaullist France Embraced the US Model of Securities Regulation
Yves-Marie Péréon’s Moralizing the Market: How Gaullist France Embraced the US Model of Securities Regulation recounts the creation of the major French regulatory body for securities, the Commission des Opérations de Bourse (COB), from the postwar period to the last decades of the twentieth century. By the author’s own admission, the book remains relatively modest in its ambitions, providing an account of the origins of independent market regulat…
William J. N ovak , Stephen W. S awyer , and James T. S parrow Social Freedom, Democracy and the Political: Three Reflections on Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism
Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism is an important clarion call for an urgent rethinking of the possibilities of a socialism for the twenty-first century. One of the most surprising and satisfying aspects of Axel Honneth’s timely new book is its recovery of the continued vitality of John Dewey’s pragmatic democratic philosophy. These reflections on Honneth’s use of John Dewey for democratizing social freedom, take stock of and explore the political…
Foucault, Neoliberalism and Beyond
Emmanuel Fureix et François Jarrige La modernité désenchantée. Relire l'histoire du xixe siècle français Paris, La Découverte, 2015, 390 p
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Towards Democracy and its Paradoxes
Maurizio Gribaudi Paris ville ouvrière. Une histoire occultée, 1789-1848 Paris, La Découverte, 2014, 444 p
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Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice
Foucault and the state
Foucault and the state Stephen W. Sawyer (bio) For those attentive to the epochal shifts of globalization, the state has been either serving global capital or on its way out for decades. Neo-liberalism prones new scales of economic and political organization and the promise of a global civil society while international law ostensibly undermines the traditional functions of state power.1 The inadequacy of the state has found an equally sharp echo …
The Forgotten Democratic Tradition of Revolutionary France
This article offers an interpretation of a key moment in the long history of democracy. Its hypothesis may be simply stated in the following terms: key political theorists and administrators in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France defined democracy as a means for solving public problems by the public itself. This conception of democracy focused on inventing effective practices of government, administrative intervention and regulatory p…
Beyond Stateless Democracy
Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the…
Toward a history of the democratic state
Toward a history of the democratic state William J. Novak (bio), Stephen W. Sawyer (bio), and James T. Sparrow (bio) Over the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of…
Déglobaliser l'histoire globale de l'Europe
Déglobaliser l'histoire globale de l'EuropeCet article soutient que les récentes histoires globales de l'Europe ne représentent qu'un mode très spécifique de conscience globale dans l'historiographie et les sciences sociales européennes. S'il ne fait aucun doute que notre compréhension du passé européen serait plus que desservie par un isolationnisme malvenu ou le simple rejet des considérables gains scientifiques de l'histoire globale, les récen…
A Fiscal Revolution: Statecraft in France’s Early Third Republic
This article argues that before the transformative impact of the income tax in the second decade of the twentieth century, a hitherto undocumented fiscal revolution occurred in the 1860s and 1870s as well. While this fiscal revolution actually increased economic inequalities, it also prepared the foundation for a new state-society relation, which was essential for the creation of the income tax, by deploying these extraordinary new revenues towar…
An American Model for French Liberalism: The State of Exception in Édouard Laboulaye's Constitutional Thought
Louis Blanc’s theory of the liberal democratic state
Louis Blanc’s theory of the liberal democratic state Stephen W. Sawyer (bio) Financial and political centralization, territorial homogeneity, an elephantine bureaucracy, a vast corps of civil servants, equality over liberty: these supposed ideals of the French Jacobin state have been a seemingly inexhaustible spring of critique and celebration.1 And yet, beneath the endless arguments for or against this strong “Jacobin” state, a new state has bee…
Définir un intérêt particulier parisien. Les élections et l'administration municipale de Paris au milieu du XIXesiècle
Cet article entend montrer que la municipalité parisienne a joué un rôle central dans la négociation du rapport entre Paris et la nation française au milieu duXIXesiècle. L'instauration d'élections municipales dans la capitale sous la monarchie de Juillet a donné naissance à une culture électorale et participative locale, qui a non seulement reformulé le rapport entre les mandataires et leurs arrondissements, mais a également modifié la nature du…
Innovation traditions, energy conditions, and state energy policy adoption
Technocracy versus reality: Perceptions in solar policy
Innovation traditions, energy conditions, and state energy policy adoption
State Energy Conditions and Policy Development
By design and default, responsibility for many elements of energy policy in the U.S. is shifting from the federal level to the states and private sector. Actions taken by design center around New Federalism proposals which promise to turn over to the states powers and prerogatives usurped by the federal government over the past 20 years. Default refers to the Reagan administration's efforts to reduce government involvement at all levels in energy…
What Happened to the Energy Crisis? Sorting out the Future
Placing Sovereignty: Democratic Capitals as a Histoire-Problème
In his article on historical methodology in quantitative history, “De l’histoire-récit à l’histoire-problème”, as well as his introduction to Penser la Révolution française, François Furet argued for framing “problems” as a foundation for historical study. Furet’s 1975 article shows that he was forging an original methodological frame for thinking across political theories and national contexts which was not necessarily part of a broader critique…
Édouard Laboulaye and the Statue of Liberty: Forging the Democratic Experience
Portrait of Édouard Laboulaye Collège de France. From the Treaty of Paris to Barack Obama’s “bonjour” at the end of his first press conference, the United States and France have cast a friendship that has been at the heart of the democratic experience. The eminent French Historian, René Rémond, has outlined the three Frenchmen who, alongside the many great Americans, from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Jefferson, were dedicated to this enduring frie…
Édouard Laboulaye et la Statue de la Liberté: L’élaboration de l’expérience démocratique
Portrait d’Édouard Laboulaye, Collège de France. Du Traité de Paris au « bonjour » lancé par Barack Obama à la fin de sa première conférence de presse, les États-Unis et la France ont noué une amitié qui fut au cœur de l’expérience démocratique. René Rémond, éminent historien français, a mis en exergue les trois Français qui, aux côtés de nombreuses grandes figures américaines, de Benjamin Franklin à Thomas Jefferson, ont consacré leurs efforts à…
Between Authorship and Agency: George Bancroft’s Democracy as History
Between Authorship and Agency: George Bancroft's Democracy as History
George Bancroft (1800-1891), conscient de sa place dans l’historiographie des États-Unis, savait qu’il jouerait un rôle fondateur dans l’écriture de l’histoire américaine, et la vision fondatrice qui était la sienne ne reposait nullement sur une opposition entre fiction et histoire. Une telle opposition, promue par les fondateurs de la discipline de l’histoire à la fin du xix e siècle et reniée ensuite par les historiens des années 1930, n’avait …
Définir un intérêt particulier parisien. Les élections et l'administration municipale de Paris au milieu du XIXesiècle
Cet article entend montrer que la municipalité parisienne a joué un rôle central dans la négociation du rapport entre Paris et la nation française au milieu duXIXesiècle. L'instauration d'élections municipales dans la capitale sous la monarchie de Juillet a donné naissance à une culture électorale et participative locale, qui a non seulement reformulé le rapport entre les mandataires et leurs arrondissements, mais a également modifié la nature du…
Nathalie Jakobowicz 1830, le peuple de Paris. Révolution et représentations sociales Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009, 363 p
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
History of the French and American States
History of the French and American States Stephen W. Sawyer (bio) This collection of articles is the product of two symposia on the history of the French and American states held in Paris in 2007 and 2011. The first symposium, held at the EHESS, provided the opportunity to open a dialogue on this question. Since that event, many of us continued to work in the area and to discuss the comparative histories of the American and French states. Over th…
Toward a political history of democratic state
This collection of articles is the product of two symposia on the history of the French and American states held in Paris in 2007 and 2011. The first symposium, held at the EHESS, provided the opportunity to open a dialogue on this question. Since that event, many of us continued to work in this question. Since that event, many of us continued to work in the area and to discuss the comparative histories of the American and French states
Louis Blanc’s theory of the liberal democratic state
Louis Blanc’s theory of the liberal democratic state Stephen W. Sawyer (bio) Financial and political centralization, territorial homogeneity, an elephantine bureaucracy, a vast corps of civil servants, equality over liberty: these supposed ideals of the French Jacobin state have been a seemingly inexhaustible spring of critique and celebration.1 And yet, beneath the endless arguments for or against this strong “Jacobin” state, a new state has bee…
Toward a history of the democratic state
Toward a history of the democratic state William J. Novak (bio), Stephen W. Sawyer (bio), and James T. Sparrow (bio) Over the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of…
Paris Dreams, Paris Memories: The City and Its Mystique
Paris Dreams, Paris Memories: The City and Its Mystique, reads much as the title suggests: like a tribute to a city that has offered long walks and hours of reflection, but which beckons us for more of both. Indeed, the meandering path of the book through the history and observations of images, myths, and portrayals of Paris confirms Julian Greene’s suggestion that Paris is only Paris when it is written in the plural. Rearick does not claim to pr…
An American Model for French Liberalism: The State of Exception in Édouard Laboulaye's Constitutional Thought
The French Revolution in Global Perspective
This is a timely book that has gathered an outstanding pool of historians of the French Revolution. To suggest that the historical community has not been waiting for and perhaps even been in need of a book that examines the French Revolution from a global perspective would be shortsighted to say the least. And the list of authors in the table of contents has only heightened the sense of anticipation. Divided into four parts, ‘Origins’, ‘‘Internal…
Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice
Ces nations façonnéespar les empires et la globalisation
Le postulat de cette chronique est qu'il reste encore une grande vitalité au cadre nationalà l'ère de l'histoire globale et impériale. On peut lire les trois volumes de l'Histoire de la France contemporaine par Aurélien Lignereux, Bertrand Goujon et Quentin Deluermozcomme une nouvelle vague dans un projet historiographique qui cherche à se renouveler: comment empêcher ce retour au national de n'être qu'un voyage nostalgique, n'ayant rien perdu de…
Foucault and the state
Foucault and the state Stephen W. Sawyer (bio) For those attentive to the epochal shifts of globalization, the state has been either serving global capital or on its way out for decades. Neo-liberalism prones new scales of economic and political organization and the promise of a global civil society while international law ostensibly undermines the traditional functions of state power.1 The inadequacy of the state has found an equally sharp echo …
Beyond Stateless Democracy
Pierre Bourdieu began his posthumously published lectures “On the State” by highlighting the three dominant traditions that have framed most thinking about the state in Western social science and modern social theory. On the one hand, he highlighted what he termed the “initial definition” of the state as a “neutral site” designed to regulate conflict and “serve the common good.” Bourdieu traced this essentially classical liberal conception of the…
In Search of the Liberal Moment
The revival of liberal thought in France during the 1970s and 1980s is a remarkable development in contemporary European intellectual history. In this book, British, American, and French scholars offer a fresh take on twentieth-century liberal revival and examine how neo-liberalism developed and influenced contemporary politics and policy.
In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-Totalitarianism, and Intellectual Politics in France Since 1950
Introduction. Investigating inequalities: A new Tocqueville
On February 5, 2016 we held the first jointly organized symposium by the American University of Paris and The Tocqueville Review. It has grown naturally out of the shared mission of an international university and The Tocqueville Society, which has had the association of Europe and United States as one of its fundamental traits
Political science (39 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (24 works) · European Political History Analysis (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Democracy (17 works) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · History (15 works)