Book Launch: Demos Rising, Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800–1850 (CUP, 2025)

ABSTRACT:
A political history exploring the concept of demos in the French government during the period of 1800 to 1850.
In his previous book, Demos Assembled, historian Stephen W. Sawyer offered a transatlantic account of the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. In Demos Rising, he presents readers of political history with a prequel whose ambitious claim is that a genuine demos became possible in France only with the development of government regulation and administration. Focusing on democracy as a form of administration rather than as a form of sovereignty allows Sawyer to explore urban planning, work and private enterprise, health administration, and much more as cornerstones of a self-governing society of equals.
Examining the period between 1800 and 1850, Sawyer studies a set of thinkers who debated at length over the material problems of everyday life, sparking calls for political action and social reform in the face of conflict wreaked by deforestation, urbanization, health crises, labor relations, industrial capitalism, religious tensions, and imperial expansion. The solutions to these problems, Sawyer argues, were sought—and sometimes found—not through elections, as one might assume, but rather through the “care for all” promised by modern administrative power, regulatory intervention, and social welfare programs. By studying this profound transformation in governance, the book wagers, we can better understand the origin and meaning of democracy—even when events in our own time have thrown the concept into doubt.

BIOS:
Stephen W. Sawyer is the Ballantine-Leavitt Professor of History and director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris (AUP). Sawyer came to AUP from the University of Chicago Center in Paris and the École Normale Supérieure where he was lecturer in the final years of his dissertation. After receiving fellowships from the EHESS, Fulbright, and Sciences Po, Sawyer served as part-time assistant to Pierre Rosanvallon at the Collège de France. He has served on the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and as associate editor for its English version since 2012. In 2014-15, he was named inaugural Neubauer Collegium Fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2014, he was appointed publications director of The Tocqueville Review and subsequently founded the online platform Tocqueville21 in 2017. In 2018-2019, he was named research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. The core of his multi-volume project articulates a history and theory of democracy as a mode of popular magistrature, administration and public regulation.

Quentin Deluermoz is a professor of history and director of the ECHELLES laboratory at Paris Cité University. He holds a PhD from the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne (2006). He has taught at various universities (Paris I, EHESS, ENS, Sciences Po Paris), has been a Visiting Scholar at St John's College, Cambridge, and a guest lecturer at several universities (Open University, Universities of Tirana and Rio, Mora Institute in Mexico City, University of Mumbai, etc.). A senior lecturer at the University of Paris 13 between 2009 and 2020, and a junior member of the Institut universitaire de France between 2013 and 2018, he has been a professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris Cité since 2020. In 2024, Deluermoz was awarded the British Academy Global Professorship Award for his project "Rethinking Nineteenth-Century European Modernities" at the University of Cambridge.

Hayley J. Hooper is an Associate Professor in Law. She is also an academic affiliate of the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights. She holds an LLB from the University of Glasgow, and a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL), MPhil in Law, and a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford. Her teaching interests include European Union Law, Constitutional Law, and Administrative Law. Her interests are broadly within the fields of Constitutional Law and Administrative Law. Hayley is the co-author of Parliament's Secret War (Hart: Bloomsbury, 2018). This book concerns war powers in the British Constitution and offers a critical inquiry into the Westminster Parliament's role in relation to the war prerogative since the beginning of the twentieth century. Hayley is also working on a monograph on the closed material procedure, a process that facilitates the use of national security evidence in civil litigation.

Jakob Vogel is a professor of 19th- and 20th-century European history at the Centre for History at Sciences Po since April 2011. He was director of the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin from 2018 to 2023. His research focuses on the cultural, economic, and social history of Europe, the history of science and knowledge, nationalism, military history, and European colonialism. Vogel received his doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1995 and completed his habilitation at the Technische Universität Berlin in 2005. His recent publications include collective volumes on European memory, knowledge circulation, and academic freedom.