Download this review as a Word document
Return to Issue 2
Stephen W. Sawyer, Demos Rising: Democracy & the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800–1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Notes, references, illustrations, and index. 320 pp. $35. ISBN: 9780226837598.
Review Essay by Lucia Rubinelli, Yale University
Stephen Sawyer has gotten us used to thinking about democracy and its histories from an unusual perspective. Already in the first book of the trilogy, Demos Assembled, he offered a compelling argument for seeing democracy outside the strict confines dictated by the idea of popular sovereignty, with its corollary emphasis on the theories and practices of suffrage, elections, and legislatures.[1] The second installment, Demos Rising, provides an even more unsettling interpretation of the rise of modern democracy in nineteenth-century France. Setting aside standard institutional understandings of democratic politics altogether, Sawyer invites us to view it through the eyes of the thinkers who were theorizing its advent in real time. According to François Guizot and many others, democracy was not so much a political regime as a state of society, one in which the ideal of self-government is not realized in the constitutional structure of the state—which indeed remained monarchical and highly inegalitarian for most of the period under scrutiny. Rather, self-government matures and manifests itself in the daily practice of collectively running a modern society. This understanding of democracy becomes visible, Sawyer argues, in a number of surprisingly diverse contexts: forestry regulation, the administration of urban development, the rise and expansion of public health, the progressive regulation of both labor and capital, the complicated relation between democratic politics and religion, and even colonial expansion. In all these domains, the central place occupied by the demos produced an increasingly capacious understanding of the meaning and practice of self-government, where “government” referred to the administration of collective life in all its facets and with all its challenges.
This perspective, which unsettles the familiar narrative about the necessary connection between popular sovereignty and democracy, forces us to shift our attention toward the social sphere as the fundamental precondition for any meaningful theory and practice of political democracy. This shift is the book’s most important contribution: breaking the invisible but highly consequential barrier that separates the study of democracy as a regime type, approached through the language and methods of political science, from the social preconditions that make its existence possible. This shift is not only an insightful move historically, since it no doubt helps us better understand both the rise of democracy in the nineteenth century and its later success as the dominant paradigm of political, cultural and social legitimacy. But also, and perhaps most importantly, it offers a new lens through which to assess the current challenges facing democratic politics. It compels us to confront the question of what happens when the institutional infrastructure of politics remains democratic, but the social substratum that lends those institutions legitimacy and is, in turn, the object of their agency, can no longer be credibly described as self-governing. It is with both questions—the historical and the contemporary—in mind that I want to approach the role of science and scientific knowledge in the rise of the demos.
One of the most pressing questions to emerge from early nineteenth-century reflections on the rise of democracy is what a society needs to know about itself in order to meaningfully exercise control over its own running and administration. Sawyer addresses this question in chapter seven, where he examines how thinkers across the political spectrum reformulated their understandings of religion to legitimize effective social action and the corresponding rise in administrative capacity to intervene in social relations. He does so by foregrounding a surprising finding: that most thinkers believed it necessary to couch knowledge about society in nonsecular terms and did so by combining Protestantism’s emphasis on individuality with the account of social solidarity and social unity that had characterized the theory and practice of the early Catholic Church. Only such a refashioned understanding of religion, it was argued, could provide a sufficiently solid foundation for social action in an expanding democratic society.
I find this reading both original and surprising, though I fear it risks subsuming the relevance of the rise of the social sciences under the language of religiosity that often—though not always, or necessarily—accompanied their diffusion. Sawyer is right to point out that the first social scientists, from Henri de Saint-Simon to AugusteComte, were steeped in the language and imaginary of religion. They not only used its symbols extensively but they also framed their understanding of society in terms of a “revelation.” Yet their use of religiosity was mostly rhetorical and performative, rather than genuinely foundational to their social science, insofar as the latter could sustain itself without substantive reference to any theological grounding. Unlike more structured religions and their corresponding visions of society, which ground their understanding of the relationship between the individual, society, and the metaphysical world in specific beliefs and dogmas, these early social scientists used religious language to convey what was, in substance, a deeply secular account of the social and of the individual’s role within it. In what follows, I will explore two aspects of this claim.
First, for Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Comte, the metaphysical plays virtually no role, nor is there any meaningful connection between worldly deeds and future divine compensation.[2] Indeed, individuals have no real access to the divine at all. What the religious references accomplish, instead, is to help establish an adequate social order in the here and now—one that, as I will note in a moment, finds its fulfillment in the successful creation of harmonious social relations. This concern, rather than being religious, seems to me to be a profoundly political preoccupation. Second, for Saint-Simon and Comte alike, God’s only real function is to have revealed to each of them the laws by which society should be organized. In other words, religion served the political purpose of endowing each of the social scientists with the authority to speak truth about society—a truth that was not religiously inflected but arrived at through the secular methods of positive scientific inquiry. Religious revelation, then, served the mundane purpose of attributing political, social, and scientific authority to those who claimed to have received it, i.e. the scientists themselves and the structure of authority that was built around them. Taken together, these two facts—the political goal of creating a harmonious society on Earth with no real concern for the metaphysical, and the prophetic role assigned to the social scientist—suggest that religion functioned primarily as a rhetoric rather than as a substantive foundation for lending legitimacy to knowledge about society. This suggestion, in turn, raises important questions about the relationship between the rise of the social sciences and the self-government of society: in what ways was the former, in fact, democratic?
The relationship between science and democracy has always been fraught with tensions, and the nineteenth century is no exception. On one hand, there is something intuitively democratic about the idea that, in the early nineteenth century, thinkers began producing positive knowledge about society. After all, it is only by understanding how a society is composed, how its wealth is distributed, how labor is organized, and how life is structured that meaningful action becomes possible. Yet, in the nineteenth century, as today, this type of systematic knowledge is not easily accessible to all members of society. Instead, it remains the domain of a few who, by controlling what counts as social scientific knowledge, also control the levers through which society can act on itself and define the horizon of possibility for what a given society can aspire to, in terms of its political, social, and cultural organization.
Nowhere is this tension clearer than in the three thinkers mentioned above and widely recognized as the founding fathers of la science sociale: Saint-Simon, Fourier and Comte. Although all three were animated by a deep commitment to improving the living conditions of the poorest members of society through advances in the scientific understanding of social organization, they sought to achieve that goal through means far removed from the model of self-government discussed by Sawyer. In fact, precisely because they believed science to hold the key to a just social order, they deliberately concentrated the power to govern society in the hands of scientists, rather than distributing it across society’s members.
For Saint-Simon, this belief meant creating a strict hierarchy of savants who, by virtue of their exclusive understanding of Newton’s law of gravitation and its social implications, could unequivocally dictate the organizational principles to the rest of society—all justified by the divine revelation received by Saint-Simon himself.[3] Similarly, Comte aimed to establish a dictatorship of science which, although entrusted nominally to three members of the proletariat, was designed to execute the dictates of science as revealed by Comte, and thus remained fundamentally unquestionable.[4] In other words, it seems clear that the specific type of knowledge produced by early social scientists was far from empowering popular self-government. On the contrary, precisely because of its claim to scientific authority, it was removed from political contestation and social appropriation, and presented instead as a form of revelation whose validity had to be trusted, recognized, and accepted. In this sense, the fact that early social scientists appealed to the language of religion only reinforces the anti-democratic dimension of early social scientific knowledge: not only was knowledge about society not used to empower self-government, but it also conferred a semi-religious status on those who claimed access to it, akin to that of a prophet, shielding them from contestation and placing them above the rest of society.
In parallel, the idea that the social sciences could contribute to the progressive democratization of French society encounters another contradiction when one considers the goals animating its early theorists. Like many of the thinkers discussed in the book, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte aimed to abolish arbitrary hierarchies and inequalities. However, they did not aim to create a society of equals, nor did they regard equality as a necessary outcome of historical progress.[5] Instead, their goal was to establish harmonious social relations, which meant relations whose relative inequality could be justified on scientific grounds as necessary to the overall production of social harmony. The central question, then, when assessing the role of the early social sciences in Sawyer’s story becomes the following: how does the ideal of social harmony relate to the democratic ethos of a self-organizing society?
Harmony, per se, does not strike me as a democratic concept—quite the opposite. A society is harmonious when all its parts coexist according to given principles that ensure stability and proper functioning. In a harmonious society, particularly those envisioned by early social scientists, individuals do not possess equal status. Their relations are harmonious because the relative standing of each member is unequal, determined by their place within a social hierarchy designed according to scientific, rather than arbitrary, criteria. Equally, the role of the individual in a harmonious society, and their contribution to its overall organization, is neither free nor active. A harmonious society functions according to scientific principles, the discovery and implementation of which involve the vast majority of individuals only peripherally, if at all. Could such a vision of society—and of what makes its political and social organization legitimate—be considered a form of self-government? If so, under what understanding of the self, and according to what theory of government? I am not claiming that there is an insurmountable contradiction between early social sciences and the process of democratization described by Sawyer. Rather, I am suggesting that the rise of the social sciences, the authority they assigned to their prophets, and the emphasis they placed on the concept of harmony challenge Sawyer’s idea that scientific knowledge about society directly contributed to the emergence of the demos as the active subject of collective self-government, even when understood as the domain of administration rather than political will-formation.
Lucia Rubinelli
Yale University
lucia.rubinelli@yale.edu
Notes
[1] Stephen Sawyer, Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880 (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[2] Of course, the metaphysical is an important stage in Comte’s vision of history, but assumes a highly specific meaning, i.e. a stage of development in which men explain the world around them by reference to abstract concepts. This stage is, famously, overcome by the positivist stage, whereby all phenomena are explained through positive social enquiry, i.e. observation, experiment and comparison—hence underscoring my point above about the absence of foundational metaphysical content in the social scientists’ use of religion. See Frank Manuel, Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Comte (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965).
[3] Henri de Saint-Simon, Selected Writings on Science, Industry and Social Organisation, ed. K. Taylor (London: Croom Helm London, 1975), pp. 198-210.
[4] Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’Humanité, Tome 1, 1851. See also Mirella Larizza, Bandiera verde contro bandiera rossa. Auguste Comte e gli inizi della Société positiviste (1848-1852), (Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino, 1999).
[5] Engels, Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880. See also David W. Lovell, ‘Early French Socialism and Class Struggle’, History of Political Thought, vol. 11, no. 2, 1988: 327-48.
Copyright © 2026 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Forum
Volume 21 (2026), Issue 2, #3