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-

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

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...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508690

Continuity thinking and the problem of christian culture : Belief, time, and the anthropology of christianity

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...

Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective

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.

Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust

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

Historicizing the secularization debate : Church, state, and society in late medieval and early modern Europe, ca. 1300 to 1700

Après la bataille : la droite, la gauche, les institutions

On sait la difficulte de definir la democratie, tant l'ecart est grand entre son idee, ou son principe ― le pouvoir du peuple, l'autogouvernement ― et la realite du fonctionnement de nos regimes ― les divisions electorales, le jeu des majorites et des minorites, le pluralisme ideologique. Encore la difficulte redouble-t-elle lorsqu'il s'agit de saisir sous le meme terme un regime politique au sens strict et un « etat social », comme « l'egalite des conditions », ou une forme de societe ― capitaliste, par exemple. Une theorie de la democratie en mesure d'integrer ces differents aspects au sein d'une construction conceptuelle coherente est-elle possible dans ces conditions ? C'est une proposition en ce sens qu'on voudrait mettre a l'epreuve de la discussion. On voudrait essayer de montrer que la definition de la democratie comme « mise en forme politique de l'autonomie », celle-ci etant rigoureusement comprise comme l'expression structurelle de la sortie moderne de la religion, permet de satisfaire aux principales exigences qu'on est en droit d'attendre d'une comprehension authentiquement philosophique du phenomene. Elle repond a la question de l'origine et de la signification de la democratie des modernes, en autorisant une caracterisation ferme de sa specificite par rapport a la democratie des anciens. Elle permet de situer le regime democratique dans ses liens avec son environnement historique, qu'il s'agisse de son inscription dans la forme politique Etat-nation ou de son association avec la societe de l'economie, tout en eclairant par la meme occasion la raison d'etre du mecanisme representatif. Bref, elle autorise a donner un statut conceptuel a des donnees trop vite rejetees du cote de l'empirie. Enfin, elle permet d'articuler approche normative et approche realiste, en determinant les conditions d'un rapprochement de la democratie effective par rapport a son ideal.

Conceptualiser la démocratie. discussion


 This interview was initiated by Natalie J. Doyle in Paris, a few months only after the publication in 2017 of Le nouveau monde, the last volume of Marcel Gauchet’s four volume history of liberal democracy, published over the course of ten years. It was then continued via email over the course of the following four years.
 Le nouveau monde offers a wide-ranging historical and theoretical analysis of the contemporary crisis of Western liberal-democratic culture on which the 2020 pandemic has thrown more light because of the neo-authoritarian management of the heath crisis in the Western world. In 2021, it was thus seen necessary to extend the interview to include questions about this reassertion of the political in Western societies but in an illiberal form.

Marcel Gauchet

Papers

Après la bataille : la droite, la gauche, les institutions

Conceptualiser la démocratie. discussion

Neo-liberal ideology and the New World: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet