This book presents, for the first time in the English language, Marcel Gauchet’s interpretation of the challenges faced by contemporary Western societies as a result of the crisis of liberal democratic politics and the growing influence of populism. Responding to Gauchet’s analysis, international experts explore the depoliticising aspects of contemporary democratic culture that explain the appeal of populism: neo-liberal individualism, the cult of the individual and its related human rights, and the juridification of all human relationships. The book also provides the intellectual context within which Gauchet’s understanding of modern society has developed—in particular, his critical engagement with Marxism and the profound influence of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort on his work. It highlights the way Gauchet’s work remains faithful to an understanding of history that stresses the role of humanity as a collective subject, while also seeking to account for both the historical novelty of contemporary individualism and the new form of alienation that radical modernity engenders. In doing so, the book also opens up new avenues for reflection on the political significance of the contemporary health crisis. Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of Democratic Politics will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduate students of social and political thought, political anthropology and sociology, political philosophy, and political theory.

This book presents, for the first time in the English language, Marcel Gauchet's interpretation of the challenges faced by contemporary Western societies as a result of the crisis of liberal democratic politics and the growing influence of populism. Responding to Gauchet's analysis, international experts explore the depoliticising aspects of contemporary democratic culture that explain the appeal of populism: neo-liberal individualism, the cult of the individual and its related human rights, and the juridification of all human relationships. The book also provides the intellectual context within which Gauchet's understanding of modern society has developed-in particular, his critical engagement with Marxism and the profound influence of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort on his work. It highlights the way Gauchet's work remains faithful to an understanding of history that stresses the role of humanity as a collective subject, while also seeking to account for both the historical novelty of contemporary individualism and the new form of alienation that radical modernity engenders. In doing so, the book also opens up new avenues for reflection on the political significance of the contemporary health crisis. Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of Democratic Politics will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduate students of social and political thought, political anthropology and sociology, political philosophy, and political theory.

This book explores the work of Marcel Gauchet, one of France's most prominent contemporary intellectuals, to examine the contemporary crisis of European democracy. It does so by examining the threats from ideological co-radicalization associated with the combined impact of economic crisis and Islamic fundamentalism. It locates Gauchet's ideas in the context of French intellectual history and notes the significant influence upon it of the social and political theories of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort and its reaction against those of Foucault. The book reviews the entire scope of Gauchet's writings, from the early publications to the most recent publications on the "new world" of neo-liberal individualism, economism, and globalization. The book reveals how Gauchet's work overcomes many of the misunderstandings affecting current discussions of controversial topics including the European Union, the nation-state, political Islam, the paradoxes of democracy, secularization, and reactionary political movements. It highlights the need for European societies to rediscover their political underpinnings: their capacity to invent a new collective future starting from the nation-state and to adapt to a new mode of international relations on a global scale. To do so, and to counter the threat of radicalization, they must retrieve the lost common purpose encapsulated in the notion of democratic sovereignty.

This book offers a new framework for comparing experiences of integration: regionalization must be reinterpreted as an aspect of modernization, modernization unfolding also at the local, national and global levels. The contributors discuss how and why the different visions of modernity that inform modernization projects encouraged the construction (or rejection) of regional integration, at different times and in different places. It starts with an analysis of plans for the economic integration of Europe in the aftermath of World War I. It shows how integration was identified as the means to modernize the region with a view to helping it overcome political fragmentation and adapt to new conditions of global capitalism. It then turns to the debate on modernization unfolding in the era that constituted the formative period of integration for both Europe and Latin America. It analyses examples of the complex interaction between these two different experiences, as it extends into the present. Finally, it looks at the social and political actors that promoted integration in the two regions and at the discourse they formulated to do so.