Democracy and the “Social Question:” The Case of Louis Blanc

• In Event: Democracy and the Social Question

Abstract

Scholarship often presents the “social question” as an anti-democratic debate interested in finding state-centered administrative solutions to problems of social inequality, disintegration, and conflict. Hannah Arendt, for instance, argues that the lasting impact of the French Revolution is that it placed the “social question” at the heart of its concern, and, in doing so, displaced the question of politics with the question of administration. Other scholars point out other eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual strands to make a similar argument: Monarchist thèse royale, elitist revolutionaries such as Abbé Sieyès, the Doctrinaires’ “sovereignty of reason,” and Saint-Simonian “industrialism” offer anti-democratic ideas and methods to mend social conflict and promote social solidarity.

This paper offers a different case – one that challenges this opposition between the “social question” and democracy. Turning to Louis Blanc’s thought, it argues that the idea of democracy was an important framework in approaching the “social question” especially in the context of the 1848 Revolution in France. This turn to Blanc might seem surprising. He is often associated with dirigisme because he attributes a central role to the state in solving the problems of inequality and class conflict in industrial relations. This paper contends that Blanc, in fact, is wary of the state power and argues for decentralized democratic bodies.

To substantiate this argument, it gives two evidences. First, as his opposition to the 1848 presidential elections in France and his support for the “protest” candidate (François-Vincent Raspail) highlights, Blanc opposes to the idea of a strong centralized executive power. Second, Blanc advocates for the creation of autonomous democratic bodies (e.g. "social workshops") among the working classes as a way of ensuring that these classes have democratic control over their own social conditions. Overall, this paper recovers Blanc’s theory of “fraternal” democracy that extends the idea of democracy to social relations as a way of ameliorating the conditions of the poor and working classes and promoting the common good.

Author

• Salih Emre Gercek, Northwestern University