Abstract
This article examines Marcel Gauchet’s claim that the political history of religion is the key to a new understanding of contemporary liberal democratic societies in the shape that they have come to assume since the 1970s. The Disenchantment of the World presents a history of religion starting out from the thesis that, from the perspective of universal history, the primary function of religion can be identified with the production of the unity and identity of societies. Present-day liberal democracies, it is argued, perform the same function through an alternative disposition of the constitutive elements of collective life. Where religions institute the identity of the society by accepting dependence upon a supernatural origin, contemporary society is organized as a ‘subjective form of social functioning’, in the sense that it is able to create and transform itself. Gauchet argues that the central structural features of contemporary society – the administrative state, the separation of civil society and the freedom of individuals, and the global orientation to the future – allow the practical accomplishment of the ideal of autonomy announced by the tradition of modern and revolutionary political thought. The explication of this logic establishes the preconditions for the criticism of these societies, by showing the historical decision and the internal articulations that give them their cohesion.
The Disenchantment of the World is presented as a ‘political history of religion’. The subtitle describes the book, and yet it does not fully indicate the sense of the project. For Gauchet’s premise is that such a history also creates the conditions for a renewed understanding of present-day society. The originality of contemporary liberal and democratic societies can only be measured, he argues, once they are seen in the long-term perspective offered by the history of religious political forms. The last section of The Disenchantment of the World (‘Figures of the human subject’) bears out this claim by describing contemporary society as the accomplishment of a social and political form entirely distinct from all societies of the past, which, according to the main thesis of the book, owe their political organization to religion. This dimension of the analysis then comes to the fore in Gauchet’s next project, The Advent of Democracy (2007–2017), a history of the modern period in Europe, in four volumes, tracing the correlation between the advent of democratic societies and the break with the theological-political legacy. 1 In each phase of this history, it is shown, political innovations enter into composition with subsisting elements of the religious-political framework. In the final volume, Le Nouveau Monde (2017), Gauchet returns to the task of a description of present-day society. With a great outlay of historical knowledge and social-theoretical reflection, he confirms the perspective suggested in the first sketch in The Disenchantment of the World, arguing that the relative continuity and stasis of the period between the 1970s and the present day corresponds to the accomplishment of a ‘new world’: the coherence and stability of this world can only be measured once we see that it constitutes a social and political form whose structure contrasts on every point with that of religious societies.
The historical scheme posits a slow but definitive transition between two fundamental modes of social organization. A passage from The Disenchantment of the World indicates the sense of this axial shift: The genesis of democracy (du fait démocratique) can only be understood when considered over the longer term, in our view, as the establishment of a subjective form of social functioning. The advent of democracy is the passage from religious society, that is to say, the society in subjection, to the society that is subject to itself, inasmuch as it is structured outside of religion […]. (Gauchet, 1985: 337)
To understand this claim, it is necessary to work through the interpretation of religion, although in view of our purpose here, as well as the scope of this topic, the presentation will necessarily remain at the level of initial and schematic indications. It is essential to recognize first that the term ‘religion’, following the usage of Durkheim and French sociology, is to be taken in a very wide sense to include ritual practice and myth, as well as the institutions and doctrines of the theistic religions. Gauchet identifies the starting point of his own thought in research in pre-history and in ethnography. His conception of religion is informed by the wealth of new material gathered together in these disciplines in the course of the later 19th and 20th century. The importance of this research for social thought, he suggests, is comparable to that of political economy in the 19th century, which gave rise to historical materialism (Gauchet, 2002: 31). Indeed, the conclusions he derives from the history of religion can be seen as a revision of precisely the explanatory systems developed on the basis of economic and materialist principles. The study of early societies opens up an understanding of the political function of religion, which can by no means be adequately represented by concepts such as ‘superstructure’ or ‘ideology’. Religion does not merely reflect and legitimate existing power relations: it is itself constitutive and organizing: ‘From the beginnings until the most recent times, religion has been the form given by humans to their existence in society, almost the sole mode in which they have assumed the fact of co-existence’ (Gauchet, 2002: 31). 4
The opening chapter of The Disenchantment of the World presents a description of the ‘first religion’, a term under which Gauchet (1985: 45–62) assembles the traits that are shared by the religious practices of the earliest societies. It is important to note at the outset that this concept is introduced as a heuristic construction: it does not postulate any kind of substantial identity between diverse societies, but merely identifies structural similarities for the purpose of a reflection on the social function of myth and religion. The mythic narratives of the first religions follow a pattern; they show the natural and social world being given its form during a distant time, typically by ancestors and heroes rather than by the divinities of later religions. These first generations are attributed an extraordinary creative and instituting power, by virtue of which they were able to found the place inhabited by the community and assign a mode of life that would hold good for the ages to come.
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The ‘religious’ life of the society consists in its fidelity to these foundational acts, through the recitation of the origins, their re-activation in ritual and the maintenance of the laws and the customs that they established. These religious narratives and beliefs provide what Gauchet (1985: 45) calls ‘the social foundation’ (le fondement social): the myths about the origins and the supernatural give the reasons that the social order exists and that it is the way that it is: It is possible to recompose a coherent system of societies prior to the State, notwithstanding the divergence of customs and modes of living, notwithstanding all that separates the mythologies and the differences in the modes of subsistence. This system […] is that of a radical anteriority of the principle of order, and hence a system of dispossession, of inheritance and of permanence. Nothing that binds us, nothing of our daily activities comes from us, but from others than us, from another kind of beings, who set it all up in another time, of whom we have only to preserve the intangible legacy, and to repeat the sacred lesson. (Gauchet, 1985: 27)
For Gauchet (1985: 55–6), the first religion is not only the first form of religion in the chronological sense, it is also the original, the radical from which subsequent religions derive by a process of metamorphosis. This continuity with the initial form makes it possible to speak of religion as a unitary phenomenon, and to define its political function in universal terms: Religion: the refusal of humans of their own creative power, the radical denial of any part in shaping the human world, such as it is, the attribution of the reasons presiding over the organization of the community of the living and the visible to the invisible (and the inclusion, therefore, of the social order in the general order of things, which depends on the same source). Our law is given to us from outside, all that is, nature and culture alike, has its principle and its reasons beyond our grasp and beyond our power, in the supernatural. (Gauchet, 2002: 32)
With these difficult statements, we approach the conceptual centre of Gauchet’s philosophical history. The notion of a ‘reflexivity of the social’ contains the idea that societies make or institute themselves: the forms of social life are not simply shaped by environmental conditions or other variants, such as the limits of the process of material production. If the social form has the character of a decision, it means that the society institutes itself in accord with the parameters of certain basic alternatives. The ‘first religions’ and the societies represent the radical accomplishment of one of these alternatives. Contemporary society, as we will see, represents another option, one that is diametrically opposed to the first. It can be understood as an alternative ‘distribution of the same elements and the same dimensions’(Gauchet 1985, 20) as religion. These elements, as Gauchet (1985: 23–7) argues at the beginning of The Disenchantment of the World, are to be considered as transcendental conditions of any form of collective existence. 6
We can begin to approach these claims by considering their genesis. To a considerable extent, Gauchet’s discussion of ‘first religion’ is a creative appropriation of ideas of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres, whose work was the object of some of his first published essays. 7 In his studies of South American Indian communities, Clastres described the form of political organization proper to these societies, which he refers to as ‘societies without a state’ in order to highlight the minimal role played by political power in the maintenance of social order. The chief does not exercise a function of decision or command, nor is he responsible for law-enforcement. The society operates without formal relations of command and obedience, except in the local and specific context of warfare. The chief plays a conciliatory role within the community, encouraging the resolution of disputes, and a representative role in relation to other communities. Above all, he is the voice of tradition, exhorting the group to adhere to the way of life that it has always followed. Clastres argues that this arrangement needs to be understood as a mode of political organization in its own right and not a kind of informal pre-political association. In placing limitations on the authority of the chief, these communities ‘chose’ a non-coercive mode of politics. By this means, the factor of political power is given a place but also neutralized, and the possibility of coercive authority is deliberately excluded. 8 For Clastres, it follows that one can posit an irreducible division between two modes of social formation, according to whether or not they are organized around the instance of the state: ‘It is the presence or absence of the State apparatus (capable of taking multiple forms) which assigns every society its logical place, and lays down a line of irreversible discontinuity between the two types of society’ (Clastres, 1987: 200).
In an early text, Gauchet underlines the wider interest of Clastres’s work, beyond what it contributes to the specific field of ethnography: it represents a challenge to the categories by which we order our knowledge of social forms and invites a new reflection on ‘the being of society’ (l’être de la société), which must also have consequences for the understanding of our own society. In the most general terms, he suggests, Clastres’s studies show that what is determining for a social form is the position that the collective takes up with regard to division – this term including both the separation of the instance of power from the society, and the internal conflict between the members of the society (which is in a sense another facet of the separation of power, given that this is what is at stake in the internal antagonism). Division is the original and constitutive element of any society, and the form that the society takes depends on the extent and the mode of its deployment: In social division […], we encounter at once the possibility of a human society and the possibility that there can be radically different societies – each society only being a society through its division, and establishing itself in its singularity by the position that it takes with regard to division. In this way, the inquiry into the most different and distant societies can foster an inquiry into what is most familiar to us and be informed in their turn by it. (Gauchet, 2005: 95)
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The abstract and schematic character of such a thesis could be challenged in the name of the singularity of each cultural formation, and one can imagine that a more widespread engagement with Gauchet’s work within the academic context would circle around this point. It is important to note then, that what is intended in this thought from the outset, as in Clastres, is to show that it is possible for there to be ‘radically different societies’, without this difference being explicable in terms of an evolution or a response to external conditions. It is precisely this possibility that is at stake in the interpretation of religion as a ‘fundamental option’ (Gauchet, 1985: 15) – that is to say, a decision whose validity cannot be adjudicated from an external position, since it institutes the criteria for assessment. The decision of the societies of the first religion is intelligible once one sees what it offers in its own terms: An absolute reverence for an order of things conceived as radically out of our power – but at the same time, the assurance of an absolutely stable place in the midst of this universe determined from elsewhere: the guarantee of an intangible accord with a Law which is integrally received, but at the same time, embraced entirely as the best possible. (Gauchet, 1985: 18)
The ‘dispositive’ organized by the first religions can be summed up, then, in terms of a series of structural relations that follow logically from the anteriority of the foundation: the sanctity of the mythic past and the inhibition of change or innovation; the exclusion of any form of state, in the sense of a separate locus of power; the priority of the group over the individual, and the assignation of individuals to fixed roles within the group; the neutralization of any political charge to violence and conflict; and the stability and balance of a relationship to the natural world, to which the society is deeply adapted, and which it is not disposed to alter in any fundamental way. The history of religions as it is recounted in The Disenchantment of the World consists in the gradual dilution of this collective form, and in the emergence of the conditions for historical change and movement. The shift begins, not with any kind of ‘Enlightenment’ questioning of the myths, but with the appearance of forms of political rule, in the familiar sense. As Clastres underlines in the concluding chapter of Society against the State (1987), this transition is enigmatic. The society of the first religions, following his analysis, is not pre-political, but ‘anti-political’. The social form is set up in such a way as to neutralize and de-fuse the factors of dynamic tension that could lead to its transformation from within; and it is a fact that such social structures were able to remain stable for very long periods of time, longer than any other historical political establishment. One can assume, then, that only external factors can have led to change: new power structures might have been favoured by demographic expansion or conflicts with other groups, or by a change in the mode of production, conditioned perhaps by environmental change. While these circumstances must remain to a large extent a matter for speculation, it is possible, Gauchet argues, to identify the internal transformation of religion that would make the advent of the state possible. The transition does not require a change in the beliefs regarding the supernatural origins, but only in their political meaning. For the stasis of the society to be disrupted, the founding myths must be reinterpreted in such a way as to allow representatives of the supernatural world to appear within the community, rather than being located in the distant past. This can take place through a royal dynasty considered to be divine, for example, or through a priestly caste with political authority. At this point, the narratives of the origins cease to block political domination, as in the pre-state society, and begin to authorize it.
At first, the fusion of religion belief with state power is likely to intensify the ‘conservative’ stance of the first religions, since the rulers have the means of coercion at their disposal to impose the law of tradition and to exclude conflict. On the practical level, however, Gauchet argues, the emergence of the political division between the rulers and the ruled is bound to introduce the factors of dynamic instability, which the first societies had maintained at an absolute minimum. There is a ‘structural imperative which means that any separate power effectively acts as an agent of social transformation, as deeply conservative as its attitudes may be’ (Gauchet, 1985: 69). From the moment that the instance of separate power exists, the religious order becomes symbolically identified with a certain group or individual. The rules, customs and activities of the collective are still derived from their supernatural origins, but these origins now also legitimize the power of individuals and can be related to their interests. Conflict can therefore have a political sense: the order of the group can be at stake in the struggle between individuals. Such possibilities may well remain a latency of structure, and not come to expression in social contestation. Nonetheless, Gauchet (1985: 69) argues, the emergence of political power, even in its most despotic, hierarchical and oppressive forms, has the effect of reducing the subjection of the community to the religious law, and weakening the structural refusal of historical change in the societies without a state: The advent of political division is also the introduction of the necessity of historical becoming (le devenir), the installation of a dynamic constraint, of a principle of change at the centre of collective practice, on every plane, material and spiritual as well as symbolic.
The concluding section of The Disenchantment of the World (‘Figures of the human subject’), in which the analysis of contemporary society is presented, is perhaps the most condensed and difficult part of the book, and so it will be helpful to look first at some relevant texts written in the period leading up to the publication of this work. I will begin with ‘De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte de la société’ (‘From the advent of the individual to the discovery of society’) (Gauchet, 2002 405-432), an essay first published in 1979, in response to Louis Dumont’s studies on the genesis of modern individualism.
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Dumont’s undertaking in these studies is similar to that of Gauchet in precisely the aspect that interests us here. He draws upon an understanding of traditional societies, developed through his ethnographic studies, in order to consider modern society from the outside, so that it loses its self-evident normality and can be seen as a definite historical and social formation. Traditional and modern societies, Dumont argues, represent ‘two mutually opposed configurations’. In traditional societies: the stress is placed on the society as a whole […]. The ideal derives from the organization of society with regard to its ends (and not with respect to individual happiness); it is above all, a matter of order, of hierarchy; each particular man in his place must contribute to the global order.
In modern society, by contrast, the starting point is the individual, ‘and so all the values are turned upside down’: ‘what is still called society is the means, the life of each man is the end’ (Dumont, 1970: 9). In his studies on the history of individualism, Dumont turns to the conditions allowing the transition from the one form to the other. He argues that the emergence of a society of individuals can be linked at its origin to the separation of the economic sphere of production and trade from the totality of social relations in which it had until then remained embedded. The logic of the market makes it possible for the relationships between individuals to be defined purely in terms of property and material things, rather than in terms of the roles or positions they occupy in relation to society as a whole. 12
For Dumont, then, modern society is one in which social relations are lived and experienced as relations between individuals, and no longer by way of their inclusion in an organic whole. It is a society in which the central values, such as equality and freedom, refer to the individual, as opposed to values that refer to belonging to the group, such as nobility or honour. Gauchet’s response does not seek to question this argument but rather to extend it by bringing out a further dimension of the same historical process. This great transition, Gauchet observes, not only gives a new status to the individual, but also changes the sense of collective life. It now becomes possible to recognize that interactions between individuals have their own dynamic and their own transformative power. This perception is attested to by the rise of economic and sociological knowledge. These forms of knowledge mark the discovery and the exploration of a phenomenon that had not until this point become the object of theoretical inquiry. It now becomes apparent that there is an ‘autonomous reality of the social, obeying its own laws, constituting and reproducing itself outside of any deliberate human intervention’ (Gauchet, 2005: 412). The reality of the social-historical and economic dimensions of collective life could never properly become a theme of reflection and research as long as the collective mode of life was supposed to have been set down and organized by a mythic or divine agency. In retrospect, of course, it is possible to apply the methods of sociology or historical materialism, and show that these kinds of internal dynamics were already at work in the societies of the past. Within the self-conception of traditional societies, however, there was no conceptual framework available to recognize and theorize the facts that pointed in this direction. As a generalization, moreover, it can be said that the social-historical dynamic was active to a lesser extent, since what Gauchet refers to as the ‘discovery’ of society is not only a theoretical advance but also a practical transformation. During the same period that it became an object of research and theory, civil society progressively emancipated itself from the domination of political power, and this promoted an acceleration of the change emanating from this source (Gauchet, 2005: 412–13). 13
We tend to use this word ‘society’ as a relatively neutral term for any kind of a group within which individuals exist. Following what has just been said, however, one can recognize that this term also signifies a specific and historical mode of co-existence, unfolding within the sphere of the free interaction of individuals, separate from the state (the domain of ‘civil society’ in the sense of Hegel and Marx). When he returns to these arguments in La Révolution Moderne, Gauchet (2007a: 208) nominates the ‘discovery of society’ in this sense as the point of the definitive rupture between ancient and modern forms of collective life. The advent of the purely economic point of view can therefore be understood as a moment within a more general shift, by which the autonomous productivity of inter-individual relations is recognized and enters into the practical understanding through which individuals negotiate their life within the collective. The result is ‘a completely new representation of the way that the society as a whole holds together’ (Gauchet, 2005: 412). The novelty of this representation is apparent in comparison with the religious organization of co-existence. The distinction can be described in structural terms as ‘an inversion of the foundation’: the substitution of an order that is deliberately set up, of a norm that is defined and imposed from above, by an organization that is spontaneously constituted from below, in accordance with immanent and objective laws that are independent of the intentions and values of particular individuals. (Gauchet, 2005: 413)
The new understanding of collective existence translates into a new sense of what is possible and desirable in political terms. The discovery of the historical productivity of the interactions of individuals and groups is the logical precondition for the political community to debate and produce its own order and norms. As long as the laws were given from above, there could be no sense to critically reflecting upon them, with a view to their transformation. As a rule (allowing for isolated episodes) the kings and the princes of the past only claimed to maintain an order that was given by tradition, not to create an order in accord with the dictates of their own reason. Once it is understood that society is generated by the interaction of individuals, it also becomes conceivable that it can be transformed: The advent of the society of individuals is the recognition of human power over the organization of their society, an organization that does not pre-exist them and that is not willed by others, but that they are able to deliberate upon and to produce entirely. (Gauchet, 2005: 421–2)
In other words, the new perception of ‘society’ is the very condition of democracy. This consequence is underlined in an essay written the following year, when Gauchet re-states the thesis of ‘the inversion of the foundation’ in more explicitly historical terms: In the course of the 18th century, there takes place something like an inversion of the social foundation. Initially, the foundation of the collective is situated above, identified with state-power, which is itself guaranteed by the powers of the beyond […] The cohesion of the social body is therefore considered to be first, and the incorporation of individuals into the community is supposed to be a natural quality; for this reason, there is no individual, in the sense of a detached element with its own existence, independent of the whole in which it is inscribed, and of its contribution to the life of this whole. In place of the representation of a foundation located above, the democratic revolution has substituted the representation of a foundation located below: the social atom, the individual is first, the cohesion of the collective is derived, produced. (Gauchet, 2002: 15)
At this point we can begin to see how the interpretation of the history of religion in The Disenchantment of the World has its application to the present moment. The historical analysis shows that the political dimension of religion goes far beyond the power held at times by priests or churches: it concerns the institution of social space, which is precisely what remains inexplicable in terms of the notions of ‘society’ (in the sense of the interaction of individuals) and democracy (as the expression of their collective will). In political terms, the religious division of this world and the other world – the visible and the invisible – signifies that the social order is something that is integrally received, and that all the members of the society belong within a common space and are bound by the same subjection to the supernatural foundation. The contemporary social form, it is proposed, accomplishes a process of symbolic institution that is entirely analogous, even though its sense is the opposite: it signifies to individuals that they belong to a society that knows and produces itself, and is therefore open to reflection and intervention. This is what was referred to as the ‘latent dimension’ of democracy above. The institution of the social is ‘latent’ in the sense that the symbolic affirmation of the social space is unconscious and structural, in contrast to the explicit instituting action of religious ritual and symbolism and the ceremonial imposition of imperial or royal power. In liberal democratic societies the institution of the social operates in the implicit, Gauchet argues, merging with the practical organization of the society, the effective arrangements of power and co-existence and the framework that gives it identity over space and time (Gauchet, 1985: 384–6, 2002: 546–7). For this reason, the effective power of collective subjectivity does not coincide with the society’s own claims to offer freedom and agency to its members: it is not given in immediate experience but is only available to a historical discourse that studies the transformations of the elements of the organization of collective life, in the transition from religious to modern society.
The four volumes of The Advent of Democracy (2007–2017) interpret the modern history of Europe as the gradual and conflictual transformation in the structure of collective life, from the religious to subjective mode. The final section of The Disenchantment of the World (‘Figures of the human subject’) can give us access to the general pattern of this interpretation, since it largely brackets the historical development and proceeds in abstract and schematic terms, analysing the structure of contemporary society as a systematic reversal of the religious pattern of organization described earlier in the book. We have already seen from the text on Tocqueville that the democratic revolution is represented in terms of a reversal of the priority of political power over society. In The Disenchantment of the World, it is argued that this reversal is accompanied and made possible by a fundamental re-orientation of social life in its temporal dimensions. Where religion imposes a collective form of life that is governed by the legacy of the past, present-day society is organized by its orientation towards the future. Public decisions are made and justified in the name of the responsibility for the future; activities are evaluated and prioritized in view of outcomes that are expected to represent a change or a development, and not merely the preservation of an existing situation. Individuals live their lives in view of aspirations and goals planned for the near and the distant future. Anticipation for the future is taken for granted as the element of public and private discourse to the point that one is barely even conscious of it. It is ‘indispensable’, Gauchet (1985: 347) argues, to recognize that the orientation towards the future is the ‘structural equivalent’ of the relation towards the past in religious society: Formally, the function remains the same; it is still the institution of collective identity by way of the separation from an invisible pole that represents an imperative (un pôle invisible de devoir être) – a reading of oneself from something outside of oneself.
The source of this movement of transformation is located in ‘society’, in the sense of the domain of extra-political interactions, as described above. The freedom of individuals to interact, to form groups and to promote competing interests or viewpoints promotes innovation and social change. It is an essential part of Gauchet’s argument, however, that such a movement of historical self-production only becomes possible through a gradual change in the sense and the functioning of political power. The problem posed by contemporary society is its ability to combine two tendencies that appear on the face of it to be contradictory, but that nonetheless effectively reinforce each other. The dynamic of the society can be characterized in terms of a progressive movement of liberalization, as individuals and groups gain ever greater freedom to pursue their independently chosen initiatives; and yet at the same time, the role of the state becomes ever more pervasive in the fabric of social life (Gauchet, 1985: 355–6, 2002: 15–16): The fact is, there is no building we inhabit, no space we move in, no object we use or food we consume that is not the object of a minute codification of the norms to which it must obey or of the conditions of its use. (Gauchet, 2017: 316).
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This infinite process of legislation and regulation, Gauchet insists, cannot be interpreted as a project of discipline and surveillance. 16 For the role of the state in contemporary society can no longer be characterized in terms of command. The association of political power with rule and subjection comes from the religious state, whose directives are justified in the name of the religious foundations of the society. The state in liberal democracies no longer imposes rules and norms considered to be valid in their own right: instead, its function is that of administration. The rupture involved in this shift remains disguised because of the gradual character of the metamorphosis. The transition from a hybrid form to the primacy of administration is one of the decisive factors creating the ‘new world’, which comes into force in the 1970s, following the analyses of Le Nouveau Monde (Gauchet, 2017: 292–8). At this moment, the state abandons the ‘paternal’ role it still assumed in the post-war period, and becomes the co-ordinating instance, managing the change produced by the spontaneous movement of the society: now its role is ‘to give form and practical consistency to the power of the collective to produce itself, a power which only has its sense over the long term’ (Gauchet, 1985: 352). By administration and legislation, the state provides the spontaneous dynamic of social and material change with its ‘political transcription’, so as to make it ‘globally legible and manageable’ (Gauchet, 1985: 355). 17
The administrative state can only perform this work on the condition of a deeper substratum that gives it stability: ‘Beneath the futurist orientation, there is the installation in permanence, which provides its basis and its condition’ (Gauchet, 1985: 363). By this term, ‘the installation in permanence’ – and by a series of artificial terms used in this passage, such as ‘the invisible perpetuity’ or ‘the collective perpetuity’ (1985: 365–6) – Gauchet designates a specific and modern form of collective self-identity over time. Once again, the structural characteristic comes into view and takes on its sense by the contrast with the religious mode of political organization. Religious ritual and, more generally, all the forms of tradition sustain the community against the erosion and the dispersion of the social bonds over time. The ‘installation’ of the state in permanence provides an alternative means of creating stability. The modern nation-state is conceived as effectively eternal: the elected leaders, appointed office-holders and all the individual members live and die, and are replaced by new ones, but the identity of the collective persists unchanged.
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This postulate of self-identity makes possible one of the most distinctive characteristics of modern western culture – the positive sense that it gives to change and novelty: The valorization of movement, of rupture, and of novelty was only possible because of this new dispositive, which anchors it. It provides the solid base without which the activities of massive investment, long term calculation, and methodical risk in view of the future could not have become so normalized, so much part of the fabric of everyday life. Beneath the economy of the future, there is the political form of the collective perpetuity, which constitutes its historical condition of possibility and its symbolic and practical substrate. (Gauchet, 1985: 366)
In this way, the contrast between religion and contemporary society offers the key to a reflective understanding of a subjective mode of co-existence that is not given as such in social experience. The metamorphosis of collective organization that takes place in the course of the transition from religion (la sortie de la religion) essentially consists in the deployment of the divisions that the religious structuration holds in check and neutralizes. 19 It can be said that contemporary society ‘accepts’ division, in that it allows itself to be organized around a series of articulating divisions, without, however, explicitly assuming them as part of its self-conception. If contemporary society mis-represents itself, Gauchet suggests, it is in part because the founding democratic ideals were conceived within the religious formation and carried over a commitment to political unity and substantial social cohesion from the latter without question. The history of the democratic political form, he argues, can be characterized in terms of a renunciation of the idea of ‘a social self immediately present to itself’, and the putting in place of the practical conditions that allow ‘a more authentically subjective collective functioning’ (Gauchet, 1985: 337). The accomplishment of a subjective mode of existence at the collective level is not accomplished by the fusional participation of individuals in the operations of power, as imagined by the tradition of revolutionary thought. On the contrary, the democratic social form allows a movement towards privatization, which ends by relegating the concern of the citizen with public affairs to the status of one possible area of interest among others (Gauchet, 1985: 342–3). This movement towards individualization, the absorption in particular interests and the private sphere of life is an illustration of a more general multiplication of forms of division accompanying the dissolution of religious heteronomy: ‘The reduction of alterity is not the restitution of transparent identity, but the re-composition of the economy of difference, separation and opposition between individuals in a purely profane mode’ (Gauchet, 1985: 318–19).
In the profane mode, the ‘economy of difference’ replaces the alterity of the mythic or divine founding agency with a series of articulating and functional separations. The state is no longer the symbolic centre of the society: it occupies a position of exteriority that allows it to oversee the society as a whole and to modify its legal and regulative apparatus in order to orient its movement. The expectation that the community should be bound by an ultimate horizon of shared convictions is progressively abandoned: in the place of substantial unity, democratic society has the organizational unity created by the institutionalization of the framework for economic competition and ideological conflict. The orientation towards the future divides the society as a whole from itself, since this future is no longer anticipated as its utopian realization, but merely as an indefinite process of becoming-other.
These divisions are the effective forms of political immanence, which Gauchet (1985: 375) refers to as an ‘entre-soi’. The expression combines two meanings that cannot be captured in one translation. To be entre soi is to be ‘alone together’, without any alien presence (as in ‘to be among friends’). In this context, by extension, it designates a mode of collective existence that functions without a foundational reference to a supernatural origin. By its literal meaning, the expression also signals that the principle of autonomy is located between us, and not in us: Nothing comes from elsewhere to model the relation (le lien) between the members of the society: everything is within the reach of their will and is the product of their actions; but no one among them can personally be master and possessor of the result: such is the general rule of the coherence of the collective form as a subjective form. (Gauchet, 1985: 377)
From an historical point of view, this interpretation allows Gauchet to inscribe contemporary society within what he calls ‘the modern revolution’, the long-term process, engaged since the 16th century, by which human communities have assumed their individual and collective autonomy. In this historical picture, contemporary liberal democracies are an entirely profane and functional version of the liberation from religious and traditional rule. The revolution has been completed, and subjectivity realized, but in a form that is so different from what it had first been anticipated to be, that it is unrecognized for the accomplishment that it is, producing a society that does not know itself, and that one can only see against the foil of its negative image in the religious mode of organization that it replaces. In Le Nouveau Monde (2017), it is argued that this world is to be understood as the ‘structural radicalization’ of modernity: the ‘new world’ commences when the subjective functioning begins to operate without the support of the religious architecture that fell away with the ‘silent revolution’ that Gauchet locates in the 1970s – the dissolution of the state as a power of command, of the nation as the incorporation of individuals, of the teleological destination giving direction to the historical movement (Gauchet, 2017: 10–11). One could argue that in positioning the contemporary moment as the outcome of the modern revolution, Gauchet’s analysis serves as a legitimation of existing society. Such is in effect the assessment of the many critics who have described his work as a form of liberalism or even neo-liberalism. 20 In its intention, at least, however, The Disenchantment of the World is ideal-descriptive, rather than ideological: it explicates the logic of liberal democratic society, and positions it within the long-term historical perspective. To discern the traits of a distinctively modern subjectivity in this social form in no way forecloses criticism of it, since it does not exclude that the subjective form can produce aberrations of its own. This is precisely the thrust of a new line of argument presented in a series of essays from the mid-1990s onwards. In these texts, Gauchet describes contemporary society as a ‘democracy against itself’, undermining itself in the very movement by which it consolidates its own principles. 21 I will not enter into this critique here. At this preparatory stage, it suffices to say that by allowing us to recognize the ‘normal’ regime in which we live – the representative state, the society of individuals, the orientation towards the future – as the structural framework required by the decision for autonomy, Gauchet’s analysis makes it possible to analyse the contradictions and impasses of this regime as coming from within the movement to accomplish autonomy. Far from functioning to legitimize the existing order, then, the effect of this analysis is to establish the condition for critique, since the critique of a social order is only possible once one apprehends the end to which it works.
Footnotes
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The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
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