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Marcel Gauchet

Bio: Marcel Gauchet is an academic researcher from School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. The author has contributed to research in topics: Democracy & Politics. The author has an hindex of 22, co-authored 96 publications receiving 2113 citations.


Papers
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01 Jan 1985

115 citations

BookDOI
14 Sep 1995
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the necessity of a pouvoir supplementaire in a hierarchy of tiers, where le peuple and les elus charges de parler en son nom.
Abstract: L’objet de ce livre est double : il s’efforce d’eclairer un aspect du devenir politique contemporain a partir d’une veine meconnue de l’experience revolutionnaire. De l’ete 1789 jusqu’au coup d’Etat de Brumaire, la recherche d’un « tiers-pouvoir » n’a cesse de hanter le debat sur l’organisation representative. La Revolution est obsedee d’unite, unite de la Nation souveraine et de ses representants, unite des pouvoirs entre eux grâce a la subordination de l’organe d’execution au supreme pouvoir d’expression de la volonte generale. Contre cette doctrine dominante, un courant critique aussi divers qu’insistant s’est continument employe a faire valoir la necessite d’un pouvoir supplementaire, situe en tiers non seulement entre le legislatif et l’executif, mais entre le peuple et les elus charges de parler en son nom. C’est ce courant qu’il s’est agi de tirer de l’ombre. Son interet premier est de permettre de comprendre de l’interieur le pourquoi de l’echec politique de la Revolution francaise. Il a ete fondamentalement un echec a concevoir et a constituer un systeme representatif viable. Mais, au-dela de la Revolution, c’est le parcours de la democratie sur deux siecles qui acquiert une intelligibilite nouvelle. Ce tiers-pouvoir dont revaient les revolutionnaires est tres exactement celui auquel les cours constitutionnelles donnent corps un peu partout aujourd’hui. Ces efforts lointains pour le definir dans l’abstrait nous font saisir le sens de son incarnation actuelle. Ils nous autorisent a resituer les affirmations paralleles du pouvoir du juge et du pouvoir de l’opinion auxquelles nous assistons dans le deploiement de la logique representative sur la longue duree. Les questions de la Revolution francaise restent les notres, au milieu des mutations qui paraissent nous emmener loin d’elle. En cessant d’etre un modele, elle devient plus que jamais notre probleme, le probleme ou dechiffrer notre condition politique.

78 citations

Book
01 Jan 1997

71 citations


Cited by
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Book
01 Jan 2002
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that both formalists and Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had been about distribution and exchange, and they argued that to understand a society, one must first of all understand how it continues to exist, or, as they put it, "reproduces" itself by endless creative activity.
Abstract: tive, both Formalists and Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had been about distribution and exchange. To understand a society, they argued, one must first of all understand how it continues to exist—or, as they put it, “reproduces” itself—by endless creative activity. This was quite different from functionalism. Functionalists begin with a notion of “society,” then ask how that society manages to hold itself together. Marxists start by asking how what we call “society” is continually being re-created through various sorts of productive action, and how a society’s most basic forms of exploitation and inequality are thus rooted in the social relations through which people do so. This has obvious advantages. The problem with the whole “mode of production” approach, though, was that it was developed to analyze societies with a state: that is, in which there is a ruling class that maintains an apparatus of coercion to extract a surplus from the people who do most of the productive work. Most of the real triumphs of the MoP approach—I am thinking, for example, of Perry Anderson’s magisterial “Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism” (1974a) and “Lineages of the Absolutist State” (1974b)—deal with outlining the history of different modes of production, many of which can coexist in a given society; the way in which the dominant one provides the basis for a ruling class whose interests are protected by the state; the way that modes of production contain fundamental contradictions that will, at least in most cases, ultimately drive them to turn into something else. Once one turns to societies without a state, it’s not clear how any of these concepts are to be applied. One thing Marxism did introduce was a series of powerful analytical terms—exploitation, fetishism, appropriation, reproduction... —that everyone agreed Marx himself had used brilliantly in his analysis of Capitalism, but that no one was quite sure how to apply outside it. Different scholars would use these terms in very different ways and then would often end up quar-

604 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A close reading of the Comaroffs' Of Revelation and Revolution illustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: To this point, the anthropology of Christianity has largely failed to develop. When anthropologists study Christians, they do not see themselves as contributing to a broad comparative enterprise in the way those studying other world religions do. A close reading of the Comaroffs’ Of Revelation and Revolution illustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished. While it is possible to locate the cause in part in the culture of anthropology, with its emphasis on difference, problems also exist at the theoretical level. Most anthropological theories emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change. This emphasis becomes problematic where Christianity is concerned, because many kinds of Christianity stress radical change and expect it to occur. Confronted by people claiming that radical Christian change has occurred in their lives, anthropologists become suspicious and often explain away th...

514 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe form a distinctive cluster within the wider north Atlantic and pan-European populist conjuncture, and that they are distinctive i...
Abstract: This paper argues that the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe form a distinctive cluster within the wider north Atlantic and pan-European populist conjuncture. They are distinctive i...

504 citations

Book
20 Nov 2008
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an overview of the modern mixed regime with respect to the sense of powerlessness and symbols of depoliticization, and the preference for judgement.
Abstract: Preface Introduction Part I. Overseeing Democracy: 1. Vigilance, denunciation, evaluation 2. The overseers 3. The thread of history 4. Legitimacy conflicts Part II. The Sovereignty of Prevention: 5. From the right of resistance to complex sovereignty 6. Self-critical democracies 7. Negative politics Part III. The People as Judge: 8. Historical references 9. Almost legislators 10. The preference for judgement Part IV. Unpolitical Democracy: 11. The sense of powerlessness and symbols of depoliticization 12. The populist temptation 13. Lessons of unpolitical economy 14. Conclusion: the modern mixed regime.

454 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a detailed examination of religious life in Western Europe before and after the Reformation is presented, concluding that the changes in social structure and religious experience that occurred during this period were considerably more complex than either the old or new paradigms suggest and, indeed, that the two Paradigms are neither so opposed nor so irreconcilable as many of their defenders contend.
Abstract: In recent years, the sociology of religion has been consumed by a debate over secularization that pits advocates of a new, rational-choice paradigm (the so-called religious economies model) against defenders of classical secularization theory. According to the old paradigm, the Western world has become increasingly secular since the Middle Ages; according to the new paradigm, it has become increasingly religious. I put these two images of religious development to the test through a detailed examination of religious life in Western Europe before and after the Reformation. I conclude that the changes in social structure and religious experience that occurred during this period were considerably more complex than either the old or new paradigms suggest and, indeed, that the two paradigms are neither so opposed nor so irreconcilable as many of their defenders contend. It is possible, indeed probable, that Western society has become more secular without becoming less religious. I discuss the limitations of the two competing paradigms and sketch the outlines of a more adequate theory of religious change

311 citations