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Abstract
Marcel Gauchet's theory of democracy focuses on the secularization of Western societies and the emergence of “autonomy” in them—Weber's “disenchantment of the world.” The nineteenth-century liberalism that resulted failed to generate a sense of collective purpose that could fill the gap left by the retreat of religion. Totalitarian ideologies achieved this by harnessing the passions unleashed by World War I, but at the cost of radicalization. Conversely, the (unexpected and lasting) post-1945 “social state” set the groundwork for modern individualism and established new legitimacy for the regulatory and protective nation-state, conceptually bonded directly with its voter-citizens. Democracy is thus impossible to disentangle from social democracy—regardless of its actual effectiveness. If Gauchet is right, the left's embrace of “voice” over “exit” mixes a deep insight with flawed prescriptions, as it overlooks the national nature of the experience of citizenship, whereas classical liberals favoring the “exit” option risk undermining the core of the democratic compact.
Notes
1. The welfare state is here taken to mean the policies produced by the interplay of interest groups, the media, and politicians in pursuit of regulatory interventions in capitalism and the universal public provision of services paid for by taxation (including health care, unemployment benefit, pensions, and education).
2. Regrettably, only two of Gauchet's books have been translated in English, of which The Disenchantment of the World is the first. The second is only tangentially relevant to his discussion of modern democracy (Gauchet and Swain Citation1999).
3. For Gauchet, all human groups are by necessity political, in contrast to Aristotle, who considered politics, and specifically the polis, as an end, a fulfilment of man's nature.
4. From Adam Smith's moral sentiments to contemporary behavioral economics.
5. Gauchet casts the secularization of Western societies primarily as the privatization of rituals rather than their disappearance: “American fervor or west-European rout, these are phenomena that do not affect the key point, the exit of the religious structuring of society” (Ferry and Gauchet Citation2004, 37, my translation, emph. original). Gauchet views the global appeal of evangelicalism, often seen as falsifying the secularization theory, as a thoroughly individualistic movement that contributes to, rather than contradicts, the dislocation of traditional collective allegiances and beliefs—an analysis supported by Olivier Roy ([Citation2008] 2010). However, Gauchet also claims universal validity for his theory without much discussion of non-Christian traditions. For an opinionated survey of the secularization debate see Inglehart and Norris Citation2004.
6. Gauchet implicitly views the Reformation as the consummation of Christian theology.
7. In his view of democracy as a social form, Gauchet is walking a path first trodden by Alexis de Tocqueville ([1835 and 1840] Citation2003), who tended to equate democracy with equality, although he did not directly link it to secularization.
8. A key Gauchet insight may be the insertion of politics into an existing historical conceptual framework of religion developed by others, most notably Robert Bellah (Citation[1964] 2006, 47): “The historic religions discovered the self; the early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the self in all its empirical ambiguity; modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the self's own existence and so to help man take responsibility for his own fate.”
9. This hardly does justice to Gauchet's thorough analysis of totalitarianism and its genesis, which deserves to stand alongside those of Popper, Arendt, Aron, Nolte, and Furet, to name the most prominent authors echoed in the book.
10. With benefit of hindsight, the postwar period can now be seen as a starting point for the global spread of democracy, to Southern Europe in the 1970s, to Latin America in the 1980s, to Central Europe and Southeast Asia in the 1990s, and possibly to the Arab world in the 2010s.
11. Hayek wore Cassandra's mantle, whereas Schumpeter delighted in a distanced description of a seemingly objective process, even if this process was intrinsically repugnant to him. Hayek saw planning as structurally incompatible with democracy, whereas Schumpeter thought they could co-exist, but with so many caveats that this was very unlikely in most countries (Britain being the exception).
12. “Doom” thinkers like Hayek and Schumpeter undervalued the political weight of small property owners and popular opposition to rationing.
13. “It is tempting to credit the Keynesian revolution for this newfound stability, but there was in fact little active use of monetary policy. And given the lag in adjusting fiscal policy to economic conditions and the difficulty of tailoring spending by public enterprises to the cycle, fiscal impulses were often destabilizing” (Eichengreen Citation2007, 29).
14. The revealing dialogue between Erhard and U.S. military governor General Lucius D. Clay is reported as follows: “Herr Erhard, my advisers tell me that what you have done is a terrible mistake. What do you say to that?” … “Herr General, pay no attention to them! My own advisers tell me the same thing” (quoted in Hartrich Citation1980, 4).
15. In a series of articles in 1895–96, the SPD thinker and politician Eduard Bernstein produced a deeply critical reassessment of Marx's theoretical legacy, arguing that capitalism was not running to its end through increased concentration of economic power and working-class impoverishment; on the contrary, living standards were rising, the market was competitive, and the working-class welfare agenda was progressing through democratic institutions. Karl Kautsky, and a majority of the party, stuck with the orthodox revolutionary project (even if the party stood on a de facto reformist platform). Bernstein is usually regarded as the intellectual godfather of reformist social democracy as formalized in Bad Godesberg. But Gauchet (2010, 132–49) also draws attention to his (paradoxical) deep influence on Leninism: Once the end of captitalism is no longer seen as inevitable (as in Marx), active struggle to capture state power becomes necessary.
16. From a European perspective, Roosevelt may have been the most striking incarnation of a model that emerged in the Progressive Era as described by Jeffrey Friedman (Citation2007).
17. The presence of a left-wing party in government between World War I and 1976 was not a factor in the increase in the social-security/gross-national-product ratio: “Whatever influence left parties have is indirect and weak” (Wilensky Citation2002, 234).
18. In my view, Gauchet undervalues the short-term, chaotic production of regulation through the interplay of the media, politicians, and interest groups. His anticipatory state may have been historically closer to an improvisatory state.
19. In his 1979 Collège de France lectures, Michel Foucault (Citation2004) discusses ordo-liberalism, the German school of thought that underpinned the social-market economy—a new political order seeking legitimacy in the outcome of shared prosperity. Foucault is fascinated by the ordo-liberals’ view that the functioning market economy is not spontaneous, but is the intended product of the legal system.
20. The share of GDP accounted for by government social spending in OECD countries rose from an unweighted average of 15.6 percent in 1980 to 19.3 percent in 2007; there were significant increases in the top five EU countries and in the United States (OECD 2010). Consistent comparison with earlier periods is not available.
21. In the upcoming fourth and final volume of The Rise of Democracy, Gauchet will surely build on ideas he hints at in the third volume and has sketched out in previous books (Citation2002 and Citation2005). In contrast to the stability that the social-democratic settlement brought in the postwar period, he describes a process of individualization or “autonomization” that accelerated with the libertarianism of the 1960s and 70s (of which he sees the more recent “neoliberal” agenda as a key agent). The very success of democracy in instilling in individuals the conviction of their autonomy has produced a potentially dangerous illusion: that politics can be subdued and that the body politic itself can be subsumed in legal processes protecting individual rights.