Background
Marcel Gauchet was born in 1946 to a modest family in rural Normandy.
2006
Marcel Gauchet
2014
Marcel Gauchet
2014
Marcel Gauchet
2016
Marcel Gauchet speaking
2017
Marcel Gauchet
2017
Marcel Gauchet
2018
Marcel Gauchet poses during a portrait session in TV talk show "La Grande Librairie"
2018
Marcel Gauchet
2018
Marcel Gauchet
Marcel Gauchet and Emmanuel Todd, the great debate
Marcel Gauchet Photographed in PARIS
Marcel Gauchet Photographed in PARIS
Marcel Gauchet Photographed in PARIS
(Madness and Democracy combines rich details of nineteenth...)
Madness and Democracy combines rich details of nineteenth-century asylum life with reflections on the crucial role of subjectivity and difference within modernism.
https://www.amazon.com/Madness-Democracy-Marcel-Gauchet/dp/0691033722/?tag=2022091-20
1980
(In The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet reinterprets ...)
In The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet reinterprets the development of the modern west, with all its political and psychological complexities, in terms of mankind's changing relation to religion.
https://www.amazon.com/Disenchantment-World-Marcel-Gauchet/dp/0691029377/?tag=2022091-20
1985
(In an exclusive, previously unpublished dialogue, Alain B...)
In an exclusive, previously unpublished dialogue, Alain Badiou, a key figure of the radical left and a leading advocate of the communist idea, and Marcel Gauchet, a major exponent of anti-totalitarianism and a champion of liberal democracy, confront one another. Together, they take stock of history, interrogate one another's views and defend their respective projects.
https://www.amazon.com/What-Done-Communism-Capitalism-Democracy/dp/1509501711/?tag=2022091-20
historian philosopher sociologist author
Marcel Gauchet was born in 1946 to a modest family in rural Normandy.
Marcel Gauchet received a religious education and as a child, he served as an altar boy. In 1961, he entered the Teachers' College of Saint-Lô, and then went on to become a college teacher. In 1962, he met Didier Anger, an active member of the Emancipated School, who introduced him to the anti-Stalinists while the Normal School of Teachers was dominated by the Communists. He then joined the lycée Henri-IV in Paris to prepare for the entrance examination at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, but left as felt uncomfortable there.
Marcel Gauchet began his career as a journalist in 1970. In 1971, he published his first articles in the journal L'Arc devoted to Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty and in Textures. With Lefort, Castoriadis and Clastres, associated with Miguel Abensour and Maurice Lucciani, he launched in March 1977, following Textures, the magazine Libre, subtitled "politics-anthropology-philosophy", eight issues of which were published until 1980.
In April 1980, Gauchet published his first book with Gladys Swain, the Practice of the Human Mind at Gallimard. In May 1980, Pierre Nora asked Marcel Gauchet to become the editor of his new magazine Le Débat.
In 1989 Marcel Gauchet joined the Raymond Aron Political Research Center, which is the department of political studies of the French School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, with the support of Pierre Nora and the historian François Furet. Nowadays Marcel Gauchet is professor emeritus of Raymond Aron Political Research Center and head of the periodical Le Débat.
For over a decade, Gauchet has devoted himself to a four-volume work The Advent of Democracy. The project is an attempt to explore democracy’s fate in Europe and in North America. Gauchet begins this story in the early modern period and takes it up to our neoliberal present.
Each successive volume of Gauchet’s magnum opus is significantly longer than its predecessor, often while covering a shorter period. The first volume, The Modern Revolution (La révolution moderne, 2007), considers the rise of the early modern state through to the development of nineteenth-century. The next volume is devoted to The Crisis of Liberalism (La crise du libéralisme, 2007) that lasted from approximately 1880 to 1914. The third installment is longer than the first two volumes combined: though The Totalitarian Ordeal (À l’épreuve des totalitarismes, 2010) examines the period between 1914 and 1974, the vast majority of its 650 pages are devoted to the dictatorships that flourished in Europe between 1922 and 1945. The final volume, The New World (Le nouveau monde) was published in 2017.
(In an exclusive, previously unpublished dialogue, Alain B...)
(In The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet reinterprets ...)
1985(Madness and Democracy combines rich details of nineteenth...)
1980In earlier times, Gauchet notes, religion and politics were one. He blames Christianity for the break between politics and religion, and for modern religion’s failure. It was Christianity, that put humanity on the road to territorial autonomy. This development, in Gauchet’s opinion, led the world into the modern age. Contemporary movements suggest Gauchet, like Paganism, which seeks to promote interconnectedness and “aloneness,” really attempt to return to the original age of religion where politics and religion were indistinguishable.
Marcel Gauchet rose to prominence by championing liberalism over Marxism, yet is a staunch critic of human rights and individualism. He is a self-described philosophical socialist, but is often accused of being a conservative, even a reactionary.
The key figure in Gauchet’s intellectual development was the philosopher Claude Lefort, a former Trotskyist and member of the post-Marxist circle Socialisme ou Barbarie, whom Gauchet met in the late sixties. He became a key figure of the so-called anti-totalitarian movement of the mid-1970s, which sought to purge the left of its vestigial Marxism. Gauchet moved beyond merely attacking Marxism in his 1985 work, The Disenchantment of the World. There he argued, that only in primitive society does religion exist in its purest form. Hunter-gatherer societies are founded on a communal decision to deny that they have any control over their own fate. Through the state, humans acknowledge themselves as the authors of their own destiny.
According to Gauchet, genuine autonomy can only be achieved by a politics that recognizes the importance of liberty but renounces the fantasy that society can be refashioned at will. The solution, in a word, is liberalism. Yet he expressed increasing unease with contemporary culture. In particular, he worried that French society was being overtaken by a dangerous breed of individualism, such as the contemporary obsession with human rights, environmentalism, education, and new religious fads, etc. Individualism of this variety did not nurture democracy, but risked undermining it by sucking meaning out of public life. It is in this sense that Gauchet’s conception of history is radically un-Hegelian: the path of autonomy leads not to ever higher forms of unity, but to increasing fragmentation.
The Advent of Democracy is Gauchet’s monumental effort to explain this problem. Contemporary democracy, Gauchet argues, fuses autonomy’s three modern dimensions. It has a political form, that of the nation-state; a juridical form, of human rights; and a temporal form, defined by a consciousness of history as the outcome of collective action. Individual autonomy enshrined in rights makes the nation-state the only adequate form of collective autonomy, and history is the means by which individuals and nation-states make sense of their experience. Democracy’s fate, for Gauchet, lies in how these attributes have evolved over time.
Genuine autonomy occurs when civil society—consisting notably (but not exclusively) of market relations—is separated from the state. Autonomy—and hence democracy—is achieved by separating legally independent individuals from the state, not by merging them. The discovery of society as a sphere that is distinct from the state also coincides, Gauchet believes, with the birth of historical consciousness: we begin to think historically when we recognize that the vector of human evolution lies not in the state, but in society.
By the mid-nineteenth century, liberals had achieved an intellectual synthesis consisting of three principles: the people, science, and progress. Their significance, for Gauchet, lies in the way each one tethers the desire for autonomy to a transcendent ideal. The people rule, but as a collective or national will, not as a cacophony of interests; the world is knowable to human reason, yet only insofar as it obeys the laws of nature; and history is the result of human action, which, it so happens, coincides with the quasi-providential will of progress. Liberty had “beat tradition on its own terrain.”
Then liberalism went through a crisis of its own. At the close of the nineteenth century, rapid social and technological change had fostered a sense that society was careening out of control. Politically, the development of parliamentary government only called attention to its long-windedness, inefficiency, and corruption.
Nationalists and socialists claimed to overcome liberalism’s endemic limitations with bold claims for the capacity of political action to organize society and tighten social bonds. Herein lies the paradox of the turn-of-the-century crisis: the further it advanced down the path of autonomy, the more it was tempted by a return to sacred unity.
The anti-liberal ideologies would, after the First World War, mutate into totalitarianism—the final, desperate gasp of the religious conception of society, a last-ditch alternative to liberalism. Yet the paradox of Soviet communism, Italian fascism, and national socialism was that each tried to bring an earlier social model back to life by using the resources of the very liberal democratic regimes they so despised.
But something unexpected happened on the road to liberalism’s triumph. It began with the initially unremarkable economic crisis of 1973. Stagflation forced Western governments to dismantle the residual collectivist principles they had embraced for several decades: government spending, full employment, and high wages became problems rather than solutions. Meanwhile, the crisis also marked the arrival onto the global stage of non-Western economic powers, like the OPEC countries and Japan: it was, in this way, globalization’s inaugural act. Labor, which had been integral to the Fordist model prevalent in the postwar years, was now viewed as costly and obstructive. Henceforth, finance and consumption would be the primary engines of economic growth.
For Gauchet, however, the transition to what became known as “neoliberalism” was about more than economics. It represented an across-the-board reconfiguration of social relations, which is perhaps best captured by the cultural fate of the computer. In the postwar years, computers symbolized the impersonality of a standardized, centralized world. In the sixties, Gauchet notes, IBM’s president predicted that, by the century’s end, there would be only five or six computers in the entire world. Instead, the personal computer, which registers our preferences as consumers while archiving our professional and intimate lives, has become the epitome of neoliberalism, a form of capitalism that purports to celebrate individuality and difference.
This social transformation had profound implications for the development of democracy. Where the postwar model had still assigned the state a significant role, neoliberalism tilts the scales heavily in favor of civil society, upsetting the delicate balance among individual rights, politics, and historical orientation that defines the modern mixed regime.
The paradox, for Gauchet, is that neoliberalism’s founders had the political will and historical sense that contemporary neoliberal society sorely lacks. The United States, it is worth noting, plays an intriguing role in Gauchet’s argument. Not only does he make the relatively uncontroversial point that the United States is neoliberalism’s native home.
The new neoliberal dispensation, according to Gauchet, accounts for the curiously hollow tone of political life in Europe and North America in the eighties and nineties. “Democracy” came to refer to little more than individuals and their rights. Notions of the “common good,” “citizenship,” and “shared history” were viewed—sometimes by the right, sometimes by the left—with deep suspicion, as unacceptable infringements on personal freedom. The pursuit of individual autonomy as the ultimate justification of human life and social existence accounts for the growing distaste for politics and the waning sense of participating in a national history.
Marcel Gauchet became a prominent academic, attracting throngs of visitors to his weekly seminars, without ever earning a doctorate. He is an admired, widely read public intellectual who is prone to caustic, even vicious polemic.