Marcel Gauchet has launched one of the most ambitious and controversial works of speculative history recently to appear, based on the contention that Christianity is "the religion of the end of religion." 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. He views Western history as a movement away from religious society, beginning with prophetic Judaism, gaining tremendous momentum in Christianity, (...) and eventually leading to the rise of the political state. Gauchet's view that monotheistic religion itself was a form of social revolution is rich with implications for readers in fields across the humanities and social sciences. Life in religious society, Gauchet reminds us, involves a very different way of being than we know in our secular age: we must imagine prehistoric times where ever-present gods controlled every aspect of daily reality, and where ancestor worship grounded life's meaning in a far-off past. As prophecy-oriented religions shaped the concept of a single omnipotent God, one removed from the world and yet potentially knowable through prayer and reflection, human beings became increasingly free. Gauchet's paradoxical argument is that the development of human political and psychological autonomy must be understood against the backdrop of this double movement in religious consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from human activity. In a fitting tribute to this passionate and brilliantly argued book, Charles Taylor offers an equally provocative foreword. Offering interpretations of key concepts proposed by Gauchet, Taylor also explores an important question: Does religion have a place in the future of Western society? The book does not close the door on religion but rather invites us to explore its socially constructive powers, which continue to shape Western politics and conceptions of the state. (shrink)

How the insane asylum became a laboratory of democracy is revealed in this provocative look at the treatment of the mentally ill in nineteenth-century France. Political thinkers reasoned that if government was to rest in the hands of individuals, then measures should be taken to understand the deepest reaches of the self, including the state of madness. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain maintain that the asylum originally embodied the revolutionary hope of curing all the insane by saving the glimmer of (...) sanity left in them. Their analysis of why this utopian vision failed ultimately constitutes both a powerful argument for liberalism and a direct challenge to Michel Foucault's indictment of liberal institutions. The creation of an artificial environment was meant to encourage the mentally ill to live as social beings, in conditions that resembled as much as possible those prevailing in real life. The asylum was therefore the first instance of a modern utopian community in which a scientifically designed environment was supposed to achieve complete control over the minds of a whole category of human beings. Gauchet and Swain argue that the social domination of the inner self, far from being the hidden truth of emancipation, represented the failure of its overly optimistic beginnings. Madness and Democracy combines rich details of nineteenth-century asylum life with reflections on the crucial role of subjectivity and difference within modernism. Its final achievement is to show that the lessons learned from the failure of the asylum led to the rise of psychoanalysis, an endeavor focused on individual care and on the cooperation between psychiatrist and patient. By linking the rise of liberalism to a chapter in the history of psychiatry, Gauchet and Swain offer a fascinating reassessment of political modernity. (shrink)

The present historical epoch seems to be characterized by a general trend towards pacification. Conflicts of all kinds - internal and external, personal and collective - are becoming less central to social life. This reflects a new type of individualism, rather than further progress of individualism in the classical sense. Contemporary individuals are losing the sense of commitment and continuity that was needed to sustain conflicts. This development has far-reaching effects on the very nature of the social bond and raises (...) questions about its future; the radicalization of individualism may find expression in overtly anti-statist attitudes, but it inevitably entails a latent strengthening of the state as a necessary link between desocialized individuals. The logic of contemporary hyperindividualism is also reflected in the growth of new pathological symptoms, related to identity problems as well as to the condition of solitude in society. (shrink)

The fall of the Berlin wall was seen by many as the final triumph of liberal democracy over communism. But now, in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, things look a little different. New questions are arising about capitalism and democracy, new social movements are challenging established institutions and new political possibilities are emerging. Is democracy an inevitable hostage of capitalism, or can it reinvent itself to meet the challenge of globalization? 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: on the one side, the revival of the communist hypothesis, and on the other, the radical reform of a contested democratic model. (shrink)

What this paper proposes is a reflexion on the role religious institutions play in nowadays societies come out from religion. A society that maintains a place for religion where churches are dismissed aside onto the civil society. What we verify is that the social forces conserve a certain vocation to allow for the credo to make it through modern times and to coexist with an exit from religion. The paper is divided in five different parts. The first one sets about (...) conceiving the correlation between the public and the private, distinguishing the stance of religion in these two spheres. The second part displays the permanence of religious institutions as the result of some paradoxal re-legitimation which emerges as a religion of the individual. Part three discusses the liberal idea of a republican religiosity in which the democratic liberty takes the form of a spiritual historic of metaphysical outreach. Part four deals with historic identity and its transmission, as well as with the de-traditionalization of churches and of their role amidst the loss of their very sense. The fifth and last part shows the role that religious institutions can still exert face to a contemporary background, witness to an insidious process of dehumanisation. (shrink)

Summary In this interview, The Idea of the History of the Subject, first published in French in 2003, the philosopher Marcel Gauchet offers a succinct account of the interdisciplinary project that lies at the heart of his own lifework as well as that of a number of his fellow intellectual travelers, especially in France. This is the attempt to articulate the conditions of modern selfhood and subjectivity, and to understand these in relation to the ever-changing yet always social nature of (...) human beings in general. In an earlier book, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Gauchet described the gradual.. (shrink)

My title is deliberately provocative. It is intended to give pause to all those - quite a few, I imagine - who are convinced that they owe nothing at all to religion in any shape or form and who, as a result, think they have lost nothing in the recent difficulties that have stripped the Christian churches of most of the hold they still retained over European society. Because it goes without saying, in today's thinking, that religion is a question (...) of personal choice, individual participation and private belief. This is not the kind of religion I am talking about. The thesis I should like to advance is that, whatever our beliefs, church or degree of involvement, until quite recently all of us used to owe something to religion, and that we have all lost something in the enormous change which has carried us with it over the last thirty years and which, among other things, is currently completing its liquidation of the vestiges of religious organisation that remained among us. This something is directly related to the ‘dehumanisation of the world’ with which we are now so preoccupied. (shrink)