Marcel Gauchet

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marcel Gauchet

Marcel Gauchet (* 1946 in Poilley ) is a French historian, philosopher and sociologist. He is professor emeritus at the Center de recherches politiques Raymond Aron of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and as editor-in-chief publishes the magazine Le Débat with Pierre Nora .

life and work

Gauchet received a religious upbringing from his parents. In 1961 he attended the school of Saint-Lô , a preparatory institute for teacher training, as it was then in France. After dropping out, an apprenticeship at the college followed , and finally at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. He attended the University of Caen , where he studied with Claude Lefort from 1966 to 1971. Lefort, who with Cornelius Castoriadis founded the anti-Stalinist group “ Socialism or Barbarism ”, oriented him towards political philosophy . Jean-Pierre Le Goff and Alain Caillé studied with him there . Gauchet joined in May 1968 the "spontaneists" in the student revolt, before he increasingly from Marxism solved

In the magazine L'Arc he wrote the first article on Merleau-Ponty ("Lieu de la pensée", L'Arc , 46, pp. 19-30). Together with other intellectuals he founded other magazines Textures with the Belgian philosopher Marc Richir and Libre . His partner, the psychiatrist Gladys Swain , made him discover the history of psychiatric clinics and the antipsychiatric movement, together they wrote a book about it, which they published in 1980 as his first book La Pratique de l'esprit humain. L'institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique against Michel Foucault's point of view (“Madness and Society”, “The Birth of the Clinic”). Gauchet's study on human rights followed in July 1980 : Les droits de l'homme ne sont pas une politique ( Le Débat , 3, juillet – août), which in 1989 became a book La Révolution des droits de l'homme, previously known as only one was translated into German.

The historian François Furet let him join the EHESS and introduced him to Pierre Nora . In 1980 he asked Gauchet to become editor of the new Le Débat magazine . In his first article as editor, Nora asked “Que peuvent les intellectuels? »(What can the intellectuals do?), With which he seemed to attack his previous comrades-in-arms, especially the philosopher“ star ”and discourse theorist Michel Foucault.

1989 became a significant milestone in his life when he joined the Center de recherches politiques Raymond Aron , a department in EHESS. There he found liberal scholars such as Pierre Manent , Jacques Julliard , Pierre Rosanvallon , Philippe Raynaud and Monique Canto-Sperber , all of whom inherited from Raymond Aron .

Gauchet studied the process of secularization in the book Désenchantement du monde , in which he has examined religion since the early days using categories from Émile Durkheim , Max Weber and Rudolf Otto . Religion is a special way of structuring social and human space. The purest form of religion can be found in the forms of animism inherent in societies that think political power without human interests of their own. The law occurs without mediation with people. He represents an evolutionary approach to animism that is controversial today. As soon as a human power pretends to enter into an exclusive relationship with transcendence, society changes. This is especially the case in the Judeo-Christian religion with its monotheism . The separation between people with different approaches to the transcendent leads in the course of time to a democratic conflict between individuals and the majority. But Gauchet explained that Christianity is ultimately the religion of the exit from religion: "la religion de la sortie de la religion", a religion that contains the dynamic of secularization. That does not mean the end of private belief, but that religion no longer shapes society or legitimizes it.

Gauchet is now one of the most prominent intellectuals in France. His topics are the consequences of modern individualism and the dilemmas of globalization . Its importance in France is compared to Jürgen Habermas ' position in Germany. He coined the formulation of the fracture sociale, which played a role in the 1995 election campaign .

Gauchet received the Prix ​​européen de l'essai Charles Veillon in 2018 and the Guizot Prize in 2019 . He is a Knight of the Legion of Honor .

Debates

  • At the beginning of the 1980s, Gauchet, together with Pierre Nora, turned against French thinkers of the years 1960-1970 (marked especially by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan ), whom he accused of agreeing with totalitarianism and anti-humanism.
  • In a dossier that Le Nouvel Observateur dedicated in 1986 to the “big wash” in the intellectual field, he described the structuralist analyzes by Georges Dumézil , Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-Pierre Vernant as “un échec complet” (complete failure).
  • In a 2003 book he attacked Michel Foucault as a «prestidigitateur» (sleight of hand).
  • Gauchet always rejected the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu , whose work was an intellectual disaster, a "habillage sophistiqué d'une pensée mécaniste et déterministe, qui ne permet tout simplement pas de comprendre comment une société fonctionne" (sophistic disguise of a mechanistic and deterministic thinking that just does not allow understanding how a society works).

Conversely, Gauchet has been accused of being an intellectual reactionary and conservative, particularly by the sociologist Daniel Lindenberg , in Le Rappel à l'ordre (2002), and by Didier Eribon , in D'une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française ( 2007).

A controversy haunted France in 2014: the philosopher Gauchet was supposed to give the opening speech at the Rendez-Vous de l "Histoire in Blois . Homosexuals like Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and Édouard Louis protested in Liberation because they accused him of being homophobia. The NouvelObs referred to Gauchet's argument in the name of rationalism against Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. The topic in Blois was the rebel. In an interview with Le Monde , the left-wing Gauchet explained: "Since the 19th century the figure of the rebel has been one of the right. Because the great one The tendency of our societies was the establishment of democracy. Leftists did not call themselves rebels, but revolutionaries. These terms have nothing to do with each other. So I'm not a right-wing rebel because I'm not right-wing, and above all I detest the rebel attitude The rebel is the infantile stage of social change, but I'm still looking for a project for e a better company. "

Fonts

  • The declaration of human rights. the debate about civil liberties in 1789 . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-499-55512-3 (Original title: La Révolution des droits de l'homme . Paris 1992.).
  • Le désenchantement du monde. Une histoire politique de la religion. Gallimard 1985 (English, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton 1997, with a foreword by Charles Taylor ).
  • La Religion in La Democratie. Gallimard 2000.
  • L'avènement de la democratie. 4 volumes, Gallimard, Paris 2017.
    • Volume 1: La révolution moderne.
    • Volume 2: La crise du libéralisme (1880-1914).
    • Volume 3: À l'épreuve des totalitarismes (1914–1974).
    • Volume 4: Le nouveau monde.
  • Robespierre l'homme qui nous divise le plus. Des hommes qui ont fait la France. Gallimard, Paris 2018, ISBN 978-2-07-282092-2 .

Web links

Commons : Marcel Gauchet  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ^ François Dosse : L'empire du sens: L'humanisation des sciences sociales. La Découverte, 2013.
  2. ↑ fondation-veillon.ch
  3. ↑ Pearl divers
personal data
SURNAME Gauchet, Marcel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historical and political philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Poilley