Marcel Gauchet

In Macron, les leçons d'un échec: Comprendre le malheur français II, Gauchet discusses the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, and the phenomena that surround Macron’s succession to the post as well as his handling of France’s contemporary issues. Gauchet, while acknowledging the challenges of Macron’s presidency, analyses his election as the consequence of the collapse of the French political party system. According to Gauchet, Macron was able to benefit from a populist movement against the elites of France, and despite belonging to this elite population himself, he was able to show empathy towards the disadvantaged part of the population. In doing so, Macron distanced himself from the far left politics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far right leader Marine Le Pen, appearing as an ideal centrist politician capable of transcending the left-right divide blamed for having paralysed the country and made it impossible for it to meet the contemporary challenges of globalisation and European economic integration. By detonating the tensions between the right and the left, Macron opened up a multitude of possibilities for new social and political protests, as seen in the yellow vests movement. Paradoxically, he then revealed himself not to have challenged the dominant elite political consensus of the previous three decades (as first crafted by former presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac — ‘le mitterrando-chiraquisme’), but to have upheld it. Gauchet suggests that the dynamism unleashed by Macron may yet have more repercussions for French politics as a result, and that the 2022 French presidential election could still hold many surprises.

Two of Gauchet's books have been translated into English, including The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Gauchet was awarded the Prix européen de l'essai, fondation Charles Veillon in 2018.

La Pratique de l’esprit humain: l'institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique, translated into English as Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, brings together political analysis and the study of the genesis of psychiatry and the creation of institutions to treat mental illness. Gauchet and Swain argue that asylums were an incarnation of the modern political utopia where sanity was preserved and individuals were supposedly saved from the brink of insanity. This book is of particular importance since Gauchet and Swain critique Foucault’s theory on insanity and madness. Foucault postulated that contemporary societies had become increasingly normative, and any stark deviation from the norm would see the “deviant” individual being placed in mental asylums and institutions. Contrastingly, Foucault argued that in an earlier era, the strangely behaving individuals were allowed to function freely within society, despite the possibility of them challenging society’s norms by virtue of their presence. However, this argument by Foucault is challenged by Gauchet and Swain to elucidate that, in earlier eras where these individuals were given their social liberty, it was only in fact due to the perception that these individuals were seen as radically different, whether it be as superior or inferior beings. Hence, they did not per se challenge the norms of society. Rather, they functioned as a foil for its identity. Gauchet and Swain argued that the perception of the “mad” had changed at the end of the 18th century, such that they were seen to be part of society’s ideals of humanity. Thus, with this new perception of shared humanity, their difference with the rest of society had begun to appear challenging. As a result, the rational attempts to address these unsettling individuals brought forth a fervour of therapeutics in psychiatry and the creation of asylums. In other words, the asylum functioned to hold the antithetical “insane” individuals who were no longer considered as radically “other” in a type of society that increasingly accepted the idea of ontological equality. Gauchet and Swain used this observation to analyse the democratic culture that birthed the destruction of the monarchy and its hierarchical structure.

L'Avènement de la démocratie, Gauchet’s magisterial tetralogy, carries on from his work in The Disenchantment of the World. Following the exit from religion, humanity turned to the idea of men establishing ways and processes to govern their own societies and their relationships. The first volume, La Révolution Moderne, acts as a prologue that sets the scene. It outlines the cultural and intellectual revolution that brought the ideal of autonomy to European societies between the 16th and 19th centuries, and ultimately ushered in the creation of democratic government. This volume examines, in particular, the development of new perspectives associated with the ideal of self-governance through a “mixed regime” associating three different perspectives. These underpin contemporary Western liberal democracy, but at the same time, constitute a permanent problem for it. The three dimensions of liberal democracy, constantly in tension with one another, are: le politique (the collective political imperative), le droit (rights-based law) and l’histoire (future-oriented historical action). Through the evolution of modernity, the influence of “religion” has been eroded, which has consequently diminished the political function of metaphysical beliefs. Gauchet hypothesises that within contemporary societies, the three aforementioned perspectives have been developed unevenly, upsetting the balance that was established in the early form of liberal democracy. All four volumes of L’Avènement de la démocratie analyse this loss of balance, and delve into how phenomena like juridification and economism have contributed to this loss.

Even within France, the controversy of Blois exemplifies a common misunderstanding of Gauchet’s philosophy. Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, a philosopher, and Edouard Louis, a writer, made an appeal to boycott Gauchet’s lectures at the 2014 Rendez-vous de l’histoire at Blois, an annual conference that brings together intellectuals to discuss socio-historic topics. Lagasnerie and Louis deemed Gauchet’s ideas intolerable because they were, according to them, too conservative. In response, several intellectuals created a collective opinion piece in Le Monde. In this piece, they argued that the act of boycotting the convention went against the very spirit of democracy, a principle that is indeed based on respecting the diversity of opinions. This controversy, as analysed in The New York Times, illustrated the preference of the far left for radical moralistic indictments of ideas rather than their analysis.

In 1985, Gauchet penned the work for which he first became known outside France, Le Désenchantement du monde: Une Histoire politique de la religion with its English translation coming out later as The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. This book’s narrative follows the history of the creation of Western democracy, and analyses the role that religion played in constructing a collective social identity. Four years later, in La Révolution des droits de l'homme Gauchet turned to the historiography of the French Revolution in order to analyse the debates around the creation of modern democracy that arose from this historically significant event. A few years later, the democratic dimension of the French Revolution resurfaced as the leading theme of La Révolution des pouvoirs- La souveraineté, le peuple et la représentation (1789-1799). This book examines how the binary tension between the people and the officials ultimately played part in the failure of the French Revolution’s ideals. In 2002, Gauchet published La Démocratie contre elle-même, which brought together in one volume all the political articles published by Gauchet in Le Débat since its inception. These essays deal with different topics such as: human rights, religion, school education, contemporary psychology and liberalism. As a whole, they express the central concern that runs throughout all of Gauchet’s writings: the need to try and understand the new and disconcerting form that democracy started to exhibit from the turn of the 21st century, democracy being defined by him as ‘a way of being’, rather than simply a form of political regime. La condition historique was later published with Francois Azouvi and Sylvain Piron, a book of interviews discussing topics like post-structuralism, anti-totalitarianism and the effects of May 68. In 2005 came La Condition politique, a book of essays written in the 1970s and 1980s, together with new texts responding to more recent events such as the creation of the European Union. This book presented Gauchet’s post-Marxist understanding of the political foundations of all human societies. In 2014, with Alain Badiou, a key figure in the French radical left and an advocate of Maoist communism, Gauchet co-authored Que faire? Dialogue sur le communisme, le capitalisme et l'avenir de la démocratie. Translated into English in 2015, this book presented a debate between the two thinkers on the topics of capitalism, communism, and contemporary democracy. These discussions brought Gauchet’s work to the attention of the public already cognisant of Badiou’s works. Further that year, he published Comprendre le malheur français with Éric Conan and François Azouvi. This book of interviews detailed Gauchet’s analysis of the increasing anxiety and pessimism of the French population, in regards to France’s diminished influence in an enlarged European Union, within the context of globalisation. This book was followed by Comprendre le malheur français II, where Gauchet reconvened with Conan and Azouvi to discuss Emmanuel Macron's term as the president of the French republic. Gauchet analyses how Macron dealt with the crisis caused by the unresolved issues he inherited from his predecessors. It examines how well Macron dealt with them and the extent to which he upheld his promises to the French people- leading Gauchet to the verdict that Macron’s presidency was a failure. The year before, Gauchet had gone back to the French Revolution to discuss the philosophy and historical significance of one of its most influential figures, Maximilien Robespierre, in Robespierre: l'homme qui nous divise le plus. This book looks at how Robespierre embodied the two sides of the French Revolution: the promise of freedom and the danger of tyranny. This makes him a man whose life allows us today to gain a deeper understanding of the Revolution in its essential contradictions. Furthermore, Gauchet published La Droite et la Gauche: histoire et destin which revisits an iconic text first published in Les Lieux de mémoire to ask if the ideological divide is still meaningful in the contemporary era.

In May 1980, Nora appointed Gauchet as the chief editor of his recently launched journal Le Débat. This decision taken by Nora was, at the time, perceived as an indication of his desire to distance himself from Foucault, especially given Gauchet’s intense criticisms of Foucauldian theories in La pratique de l’esprit humain.

In July 1980, Gauchet published "Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique" in the third issue of Le Débat (July - August). In hindsight, this article appears as a major intellectual turning point marking Gauchet’s break from the political philosophy of his former intellectual mentor Lefort, and its emphasis on the symbolic emancipatory power of human rights. It heralded the development of his own analysis of the inner tensions of liberal democracy and their contemporary manifestation. In 1989, in what constitutes a major milestone of his career, Gauchet, sponsored by Nora and Furet, was appointed to the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron (CERPRA), the political studies centre of the EHESS. Here, he met several other significant thinkers like Manent, Rosanvallon, Jacques Juillard, Philippe Raynaud, and Monique Canto-Sperber, all of whom could be said to be intellectual heirs to Raymond Aron's work.

Gauchet’s other collaborative works included those written with his partner Gladys Swain, who introduced him to the field of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry. During his collaboration with Swain, he completed critical reviews of La Société contre l’État, recherches d’anthropologie politique by Clastres (with Gauchet’s review appearing in October 1974 in Les Éditions de Minuit) and of L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique by Michel Foucault. In April 1980, Gauchet published his first book, co-written with Gladys Swain, La Pratique de l'esprit humain(see synopsis below).

Marcel Gauchet then began his journey through the world of intellectual journals. From 1970 to 1975, with its original instigator Marc Richir, he revived Textures, the journal created by students at the Université libre de Bruxelles, which was supported by a newly-created editorial committee, composed of Gauchet himself, Richir, Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Pierre Clastres. In 1971, Gauchet published his first articles in a special issue of the journal L’Arc (‘Lieu de la pensée’, L’Arc, no 46, p. 19-30) dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in Textures (‘Sur la démocratie : le politique et l’institution du social’, named after a course delivered by Lefort). Together with Lefort, Castoriadis and Clastres, and in association with Miguel Abensour and Maurice Lucciani, Gauchet then launched the journal Libre in March 1977. This journal, which picked up from where Textures left off, was subtitled - ‘Politics, Anthropology, Philosophy’. Eight issues were published through Payot et Rivage until 1980.

In La Condition politique, composed of Gauchet’s essays from the 1970s and 1980s, together with new texts responding to more recent events such as the creation of the European Union, Gauchet presents his post-Marxist understanding of the political foundations of all human societies. Its publication thus went against the depoliticized interpretations of the globalization process influential at the turn of the century, which emphasized the marginalization of the nation-state and the centrality of economic phenomena. Its overall theme, the ‘eclipse of the political’ in contemporary liberal democracies was then explored extensively in later works, within the general hypothesis that this eclipse explains the destabilization of European societies in the first decade of the 21st century.

The fourth and final volume, Le Nouveau monde, also the longest of the tetralogy, scrutinises the reorientation of societies since the 1970s, the rise of neoliberalism and postmodernity, and their effects on the ideals of Western democracy. This volume discusses the capitalistic orientation of the economic identity of 21st century societies, while tackling questions to do with the individualistic and economy-driven craze of neoliberalism. Gauchet uncovers the nature of individualism in a new postmodern and neo-liberal form of democracy, wherein the individualistic identity is at odds with old understandings of collective (including national) identity. Gauchet’s analysis of the unprecedented power of “generalised capitalism”, of a new project of artificialisation of human life through the combined effect of neo-liberal economic and legal rationalisation, leads him to plead for a new project of substantive autonomy to transcend the narrow, purely functional autonomy associated with the insatiable quest for absolute innovation. This project of self-reflection requires a deeper understanding of what makes human knowledge possible in order to combat the deintellectualisation encouraged by ultra-modern “structural” autonomy.

Gauchet later resumed his higher education studies. From 1966 to 1971, under the guidance of Claude Lefort, his professor at the University of Caen Normandy, Gauchet wrote his DESA thesis on Freud and Lacan. Lefort steered Gauchet towards political philosophy, which led him to study simultaneously for three majors in philosophy, history and sociology. During these years of study, Gauchet attempted to distance himself from the Marxist strain of theory which nonetheless continued to exercise influence over Lefort.

As the son of a Gaullist railway worker and a Catholic seamstress, Gauchet received both a Catholic education and a republican one in the French public schooling system. In 1961, he attended the teacher training college of Saint-Lô, after which he pursued additional teaching qualifications for secondary schooling. In 1962, he met Didier Anger, who was an active member of a union movement created by educators. Through him, Gauchet met anti-Stalinist left militants, quite different from the communists who dominated the colleges that were training primary school teachers. Gauchet then came into contact with Socialisme ou Barbarie, a radical socialist journal also of an anti-Stalinian ideological orientation. In his first protest, he demonstrated against violent police repression during the Algerian war, in reaction to the so-called Charonne metro station scandal.

Marcel Gauchet (French: [ɡoʃɛ]; born 1946) is a French historian, philosopher, and sociologist. He is professor emeritus of the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and head of the periodical Le Débat. Gauchet is one of France's most prominent contemporary intellectuals. He has written widely on such issues as the political consequences of modern individualism, the relation between religion and democracy, and the dilemmas of globalisation.

La Démocratie contre elle-même brings together in one volume all the political articles published by Gauchet in Le Débat since its inception. These articles deal with different topics: human rights, religion, school education, contemporary psychology and liberalism. As a whole, they express the central concern that runs throughout Gauchet’s entire writings: to try and understand the new and disconcerting form that democracy started to exhibit from the turn of the 21st century, democracy being defined as ‘a way of being’, rather than simply a form of political regime. The book argues that the prominence gained by the quest to secure the rights of individuals in practice undermines their actual realization. This paradox summarized in the title as the tendency of democratic culture to work against itself, is characteristic of the new situation in which democracy finds itself: whilst it is no longer contested by Marxist critique and now rests on the support of a wide social consensus, the victory of its principles is generating new problems. The triumph of individual rights, according to Gauchet, threatens to bring about a crisis of liberal democracy.

Gauchet has, in a number of different contexts, made clear his critique of 21st century radicalism, especially in its neo-Marxist form. As stated in his debate with Badiou his critique is not inspired by a fundamental disagreement over the need to imagine a different kind of society but by an assessment of its political ineffectiveness. For Gauchet, the radicalism of the extreme left amounts to a form of purely idealistic aristocratism which traps intelligence in a political impasse. It encourages a pose of intellectual distinction from the rest of society, which appears to be challenging the established order but in reality, does little to destabilise it, not least because it does not provide in depth analyses of the phenomena it seeks to combat and transcend. This pose of ‘enlightened’ radicalism ‘replaces the content and becomes an end in itself’. It delivers only symbolic benefits for its supporters, freeing them from the arduous political work needed to change the status quo. At the same time, it confers upon them a sense of moral distinction derived from the feeling of not being tainted by any compromise with political reality; Gauchet thus contrasts what he describes as politically expedient radicalism with genuine intellectual radicalism. In keeping with the etymology of the word, intellectual radicalism goes to the root of contemporary problems based on both historical and anthropological knowledge. It informs Gauchet’s project for a new critical philosophy.

The second volume, La Crise du libéralisme, analyses the Western political landscape’s successes and failures throughout the period 1880 to 1914. The increased pertinence of universal suffrage and the progress in representative politics shed light on the speed of the changes that accompanied the newfound freedom from hierarchy. It explores the return of the political triggered by the crisis of liberalism in the form of colonial imperialism and the significance of the first globalisation it paradoxically inspired, in an analysis that leads him to take distance from the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of the period.

In 1789, at the outset of the French Revolution, the representatives of the French people who created a new assembly that defined itself as “national”, were confronted with the need to attack the authority of the monarchy, in order to pursue their desire to establish an independent and competing pole of legitimacy on which they would be able to rely in their project to construct a constitutional framework limiting the king’s power. When they established this competing legitimacy, the representatives, however, retained the absolutist conception of power that characterised the French monarchy and used it as the basis of the notion of national sovereignty. In the process, they were led to formulate what they saw as the ideal conditions of equality, even before they actually debated the institutions that would uphold these conditions. Furthermore, Gauchet’s book elucidates a contradiction central to the specifically French understanding of democracy — the paradoxical coalescence of the French revolutionaries' project to construct a new, cohesive social order, and of their ideal of individual freedom. According to Gauchet, the French Revolution’s idealistic bend, which had its roots in this need to challenge the monarch's considerable authority, birthed a tension, even a contradiction, between the “liberal” and the “collectivist” understandings of democracy. This contradiction runs through the history of French political regimes until the two poles were reconciled within the Republican framework.