The thought of Marcel Gauchet forms a system against which we can compare political and international news. Since the founding work The disenchantment of the worldhe reflects on the way in which the departure from religion constructed the modern world and democracy, and how the modern individual managed to construct himself outside the religious framework. What look does Marcel Gauchet on French political news in recent months?
The challenge of autonomy
Modernity has given rise to the autonomous individual. However, this autonomy is not without problems in the current context of Western democracies. Marcel Gauchet proposes to define autonomy by its opposite, namely, heteronomy. According to him, the latter designates submission to a law superior and external to that which controls our behavior. It would characterize the human being as far back as we go back in history.
And so, by contrast, he argues that “autonomy is, first of all for moderns, a condition of law. It is the definition of an individual based on his rights which become the source of any possible link with others. In heteronomy, the link which holds us together, was in fact beyond the control of individuals. The power which we also obeyed came from a higher entity. The models of conduct, whether it be the links between the sexes, the. family, social relationships, were predetermined”. The departure from religion has projected the individual to the antipodes of this mold, leading to a recomposition of the relationship with oneself.
Now, replace Marcel Gauchet, “the challenge lies in the ability to give oneself power over one’s own life when one does not really know what one is going to do with it.” In political terms, this autonomy is materialized in the democratic regime: “democracy is the recognition of individual rights from which all power and all law come. The democratic condition thus becomes a very difficult condition, because everything that was previously saved in advance in the behavior of individuals, is to be taken care of on a personal basis.
The Great Table Ideas Listen later
Lecture listen 32 min
The “paradox” of democracy
Marcel Gauchet comes to formulate the existence of a “democratic paradox”, which results from the inadequacy between, on the one hand, the mutual recognition of rights and, on the other, the dissatisfaction experienced by an individual following a decision which he considers unfavorable. He states this paradox in these terms: “the more freedom there is to create the common framework, the more frustrating this common framework is for the people who define it.”
Democracy would therefore, it seems, have made it possible to discover the contradiction: “we discover that we are constantly in opposition to each other due to the systems of preferences which oppose each other. In this context, the difficulty of the powers consists in dominating its oppositions to define in the midst of the general disagreement, a common line which has a lot of difficulty in imposing itself and which therefore necessarily leaves us dissatisfied on an individual level. The democratic condition inevitably brings with it the frustration of having to deal with people who disagree with us.
Evening questions: the debate Listen later
Lecture listen 38 min
“The reality principle”: largely absent from the practices of political leaders?
Marcel Gauchet deplores the very low occurrence of the “reality principle” in the current political field. In his eyes, the demand for this principle by political actors has become “almost non-existent”. Echoing the recent remarks of the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, he observed that “the promise of firmness” constitutes, conversely, the political language of today. And to continue: “One of the aspects of the democratic crisis is indeed the eviction of this dimension, both moral and intellectual, which is the principle of reality. If we certainly find it in the economy, it in fact consists above all of imitate the approach of his predecessors It is a form of conformism..
Ultimately, Marcel Gauchet asserts “that one of the great problems of our democracies, namely the popular feeling of disconnection between those in power and the people, is due to the fact that this principle of reality is no longer embodied in institutions. What is embodied, on the other hand, is “is the electoral approach consisting of conquering power. But the question of the exercise of power is no longer posed in the political system.”
