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The Disenchantment of the World
Marcel Gauchet has launched one of the most ambitious and controversial works of speculative history recently to appear, based on the contention that Christianity is "the religion of the end of religion." In The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet reinterprets the development of the modern west, with all its political and psychological complexities, in terms of mankind's changing relation to religion. He views Western history as a movement away from religious society, beginning with prophetic Judaism, gaining tremendous momentum in Christianity, and eventually leading to the rise of the political state. Gauchet's view that monotheistic religion itself was a form of social revolution is rich with implications for readers in fields across the humanities and social sciences.
Life in religious society, Gauchet reminds us, involves a very different way of being than we know in our secular we must imagine prehistoric times where ever-present gods controlled every aspect of daily reality, and where ancestor worship grounded life's meaning in a far-off past. As prophecy-oriented religions shaped the concept of a single omnipotent God, one removed from the world and yet potentially knowable through prayer and reflection, human beings became increasingly free. Gauchet's paradoxical argument is that the development of human political and psychological autonomy must be understood against the backdrop of this double movement in religious consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from human activity.
In a fitting tribute to this passionate and brilliantly argued book, Charles Taylor offers an equally provocative foreword. Offering interpretations of key concepts proposed by Gauchet, Taylor also explores an important Does religion have a place in the future of Western society? The book does not close the door on religion but rather invites us to explore its socially constructive powers, which continue to shape Western politics and conceptions of the state.
Life in religious society, Gauchet reminds us, involves a very different way of being than we know in our secular we must imagine prehistoric times where ever-present gods controlled every aspect of daily reality, and where ancestor worship grounded life's meaning in a far-off past. As prophecy-oriented religions shaped the concept of a single omnipotent God, one removed from the world and yet potentially knowable through prayer and reflection, human beings became increasingly free. Gauchet's paradoxical argument is that the development of human political and psychological autonomy must be understood against the backdrop of this double movement in religious consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from human activity.
In a fitting tribute to this passionate and brilliantly argued book, Charles Taylor offers an equally provocative foreword. Offering interpretations of key concepts proposed by Gauchet, Taylor also explores an important Does religion have a place in the future of Western society? The book does not close the door on religion but rather invites us to explore its socially constructive powers, which continue to shape Western politics and conceptions of the state.
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 1985
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638 people want to read
About the author
Marcel Gauchet
89 books24 followersMarcel Gauchet (born 1946, Poilley, Manche, France) is a French historian, philosopher and sociologist. He is emerit professor of the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and head of the periodical Le Débat.
Gauchet is one of France's most prominent contemporary intellectuals. He has written widely on such issues as the political consequences of modern individualism, the relation between religion and democracy, and the dilemmas of globalisation.
To date, only two of Gauchet's books have been translated into English, most notably The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion.
Gauchet is one of France's most prominent contemporary intellectuals. He has written widely on such issues as the political consequences of modern individualism, the relation between religion and democracy, and the dilemmas of globalisation.
To date, only two of Gauchet's books have been translated into English, most notably The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 1, 2008
A political history of religion. In a nutshell, religion has developed from the animistic, to the pantheistic, to the monotheistic, to the messianic, to the atheistic. Each is a less effective means to control.
September 6, 2012
Άθλος, για όποιον κατσει να το διαβάσει προσεχτικά, άρα άθλος και για τη μεταφραστρια.. Ωραιες αυτές οι ιδέες σύνδεσης θρησκείας και πολιτικής αλλά απίστευτα περίπλοκο συντακτικό, χωρίς να υπάρχει λόγος να είναι τόσο δυσνόητο. Κρίμα, δηλαδή, γιατί η κεντρική ιδέα και κάποια από τα επιχειρήματα είναι εξαιρετικά σημαντικά και εξυπνα.
May 2, 2014
New and captivating ideas about our past
French thought, killed by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and the Postmodern gang, appears resurrected by the likes of Gauchet. In physics the most deeply piercing ideas are the simplest, and in the form of seemingly unrelated phenomena – gravity seen as geometry for example. Gauchet’s ideas are like this. “Disenchantment” is emphatically not a political history of religion alone, but much more – a perspective on the development of ideas, civilization and human thought.
Gauchet practices the tradition of substantive history Postmoderns failed to extinguish. The State is the first religious revolution in history, claims Gauchet. Per Gauchet the original religion - before advent of the city - meant “to preserve their inviolable legacy, repeating their sacred teaching.” But structurally the State comes with a hierarchy between people and their gods, some closer than others. “The gods withdraw and simultaneously the nonquestionable becomes questionable, affirmed by the hold humans have on the organization of their own world.” “The imperial ambition to dominate the world comes with the [advent of] the State,” bringing upheaval to man’s unchanging position in the world. “The power of a few individuals to act in the name of the gods is the barely perceptible, yet irreversible step toward everyone having an influence on the god’s decrees...The State ushers in an age of opposition between social structure and the essence of [religion]. Political domination, which decisively entangles the gods in history, will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting us out of the religious.” Opportunities to depart from previous religious ways presented themselves. Unavoidable questions arose concerning our fate, the search was on, each for themselves, fractured compared to what began as unquestioned practice of one’s place in the cosmos.
The State’s development is responsible for the so called Axial Age when all the world’s religions from Near East to Far East sprang forth by concepts emergent from circumstances of the State. “Higher religions” of the Axial Age sought to unify their nature via supreme transcendent principles – a superior God, Order, Idea. Ideas beyond mere order in life and no longer as self-evident as simply taking one’s place, repeating old rituals. One eventually must seek this higher reality via devotion / revelation (Near East) or understanding / enlightenment (Far East) - the conception moment of individuation.
Gauchet notes monotheism first invented by Akhenaton was on track with what had been taking place in Mesopotamia via Assyria and Babylon as Assur and Marduk were ethical superiors to their pantheon, tending to simplify it. However, the critical difference of Israelite’s god was not based on the old ancestral order but on a commitment to his saving intervention – as Israel did after all lay between the most powerful forces on Earth, thus creating something new out of an extreme social need to dominate what dominated them. Once established by the prophets who sound a good deal like lobbyists, there developed clarity of Judaism’s internal contradiction – a universal God exclusively for but one of his creations. At the height of human evisceration and unsettling of the Roman Empire - like Brooks Adams’ 1896 illuminating “Law Of Civilization And Decay” - Christianity responds with its own conceptual twist. Jesus is of God, maintaining that link, but God is now for all of God’s creation, directly accessible to all. “We are not dealing with a challenge to reason, but to the logic of a cultural system,” writes Gauchet, and only contradiction could supply the required response, leading people not to a terrestrial promised land as Moses had, but removing them spiritually from it while remaining bodily engaged in the suffering of life. A creative solution to another contradiction in empire between its inherited religious order of the old ways still present and the actual system of domination.
According to Gauchet, this separation and eviction of God from nature transforms everything that humans had held against themselves to maintain permanent identity with the past into a reversal of unrestrained action against everything around them. The old way submerged human order in nature’s order, feeling at one with nature, a co-belonging so strong any damage done required ritual compensation restoring the balance. Nature becomes opposed and possessed in a renunciation of this world in the name of the other. God, having been made external to the world, the world then became external to humans. As God was withdrawn, our perception of “the world changed from something unalterable to something to be constituted.” A full turn about occurs, from domination of people to the domination of nature. Hence our current worldwide environmental decline, the Far East only mimicking Western process without the belief system. This and development of the Church’s own undoing; the city to a Republic; independence of thought and the importance of mass opinion – so many penetrating ideas and connections. Though it could use more reference to historical evidence, a remarkable book.
Hamilton said, it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question - whether societies of men are capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. But according the Gauchet the latter is more like it. Our freedom to interact, without confinement to old controls creates a situation where no one can control the collective outcome much less predict it.
French thought, killed by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and the Postmodern gang, appears resurrected by the likes of Gauchet. In physics the most deeply piercing ideas are the simplest, and in the form of seemingly unrelated phenomena – gravity seen as geometry for example. Gauchet’s ideas are like this. “Disenchantment” is emphatically not a political history of religion alone, but much more – a perspective on the development of ideas, civilization and human thought.
Gauchet practices the tradition of substantive history Postmoderns failed to extinguish. The State is the first religious revolution in history, claims Gauchet. Per Gauchet the original religion - before advent of the city - meant “to preserve their inviolable legacy, repeating their sacred teaching.” But structurally the State comes with a hierarchy between people and their gods, some closer than others. “The gods withdraw and simultaneously the nonquestionable becomes questionable, affirmed by the hold humans have on the organization of their own world.” “The imperial ambition to dominate the world comes with the [advent of] the State,” bringing upheaval to man’s unchanging position in the world. “The power of a few individuals to act in the name of the gods is the barely perceptible, yet irreversible step toward everyone having an influence on the god’s decrees...The State ushers in an age of opposition between social structure and the essence of [religion]. Political domination, which decisively entangles the gods in history, will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting us out of the religious.” Opportunities to depart from previous religious ways presented themselves. Unavoidable questions arose concerning our fate, the search was on, each for themselves, fractured compared to what began as unquestioned practice of one’s place in the cosmos.
The State’s development is responsible for the so called Axial Age when all the world’s religions from Near East to Far East sprang forth by concepts emergent from circumstances of the State. “Higher religions” of the Axial Age sought to unify their nature via supreme transcendent principles – a superior God, Order, Idea. Ideas beyond mere order in life and no longer as self-evident as simply taking one’s place, repeating old rituals. One eventually must seek this higher reality via devotion / revelation (Near East) or understanding / enlightenment (Far East) - the conception moment of individuation.
Gauchet notes monotheism first invented by Akhenaton was on track with what had been taking place in Mesopotamia via Assyria and Babylon as Assur and Marduk were ethical superiors to their pantheon, tending to simplify it. However, the critical difference of Israelite’s god was not based on the old ancestral order but on a commitment to his saving intervention – as Israel did after all lay between the most powerful forces on Earth, thus creating something new out of an extreme social need to dominate what dominated them. Once established by the prophets who sound a good deal like lobbyists, there developed clarity of Judaism’s internal contradiction – a universal God exclusively for but one of his creations. At the height of human evisceration and unsettling of the Roman Empire - like Brooks Adams’ 1896 illuminating “Law Of Civilization And Decay” - Christianity responds with its own conceptual twist. Jesus is of God, maintaining that link, but God is now for all of God’s creation, directly accessible to all. “We are not dealing with a challenge to reason, but to the logic of a cultural system,” writes Gauchet, and only contradiction could supply the required response, leading people not to a terrestrial promised land as Moses had, but removing them spiritually from it while remaining bodily engaged in the suffering of life. A creative solution to another contradiction in empire between its inherited religious order of the old ways still present and the actual system of domination.
According to Gauchet, this separation and eviction of God from nature transforms everything that humans had held against themselves to maintain permanent identity with the past into a reversal of unrestrained action against everything around them. The old way submerged human order in nature’s order, feeling at one with nature, a co-belonging so strong any damage done required ritual compensation restoring the balance. Nature becomes opposed and possessed in a renunciation of this world in the name of the other. God, having been made external to the world, the world then became external to humans. As God was withdrawn, our perception of “the world changed from something unalterable to something to be constituted.” A full turn about occurs, from domination of people to the domination of nature. Hence our current worldwide environmental decline, the Far East only mimicking Western process without the belief system. This and development of the Church’s own undoing; the city to a Republic; independence of thought and the importance of mass opinion – so many penetrating ideas and connections. Though it could use more reference to historical evidence, a remarkable book.
Hamilton said, it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question - whether societies of men are capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. But according the Gauchet the latter is more like it. Our freedom to interact, without confinement to old controls creates a situation where no one can control the collective outcome much less predict it.
January 22, 2019
In the ancient past, human beings organized tribal societies around hierarchies founded in the orderly nature of things. The human intellect's operations work by differentiation. We carve out a whole world full of objects, properties, and relationships. At the bottom of difference is the ground of existence itself -- the ultimate Other, the difference that precedes all difference. For ancient peoples, the ground of being lay hidden in a distant time beyond memory. Everyone had a place, everyone lived a life in the system of meanings.
Then something happened, sometime around the 5th century BC, a historical moment that Karl Jaspers would call the Axial Age. The ultimate Other began a gradual process of integration into the human world. Divinity once remote in time began to find its way into human experiences and symbolic systems. From Plato's metaphysics to Jewish and Christian monotheism in the West, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucain systems in the East, history's march began with the slow coming-to-awareness of human beings as beings able to know and shape the world.
The long history of modernity, with its themes of secularization and naturalism, is a story of this growing re-entry of the infinitely different into the spheres of human control. So says Marcel Gauchet.
The disenchantment of the world, a process of "purging the magic" as Max Weber's evocative term Entzauberung indicates, begins not with a Baconian or Galilean-Newtonian revolution. According to that orthodoxy, science and reason obliterated naive superstitions in Europe sometime between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Religion, myth, and faith lie at opposite poles from the supremely rational view of the world espoused by the British, German and French luminaries of those days.
Gauchet proposes a very different view of religion's purpose and indeed its relationship to the sciences. What differentiates modernity from the ancient world is its relationship to the ground of being, not our science or rationality. It is where we seek the ground of being, what we are as individual persons in relation to it, and how we conduct ourselves in the spheres of ordinary action (art, politics, ethics, and so forth).
Gauchet's thesis raises trouble for the now-tired public debates between "science" and "religion". Science means a value free attention to objective reality, the world as it is free of any uniquely human, merely subjective qualities. Religion means a kind of defect, a failure to see behind the appearances to things as they truly are. Provincial, silly, superstitious kinds of belief.
If Gauchet is right, this old bucket will no longer carry water. The orthodoxy misunderstands two central points. First, it fails to see that the scientific point of view itself is not just embedded in the systems of human behaviors, practices, and institutions which originally ordered themselves around the ancient forms of cosmic meaning. Science is a human activity, which is rather obvious, though (proponents of materialism, naturalism, and scientism argue) it differs in that it aims at truth, or objectivity, or the world, or nature, or...
The problem is that whatever term you substitute for the aim or end or purpose of science repeats the same feature we already found in ancient religions, that of the grounding of being beyond time and mind. The very idea of scientific objectivity rests on the metaphysical image of a stable reality existing free of any human qualities, repeating the mythical vision of the world-transcending order founding the ancient faiths. True, the world of science makes for a much stranger, alienated sort of God. It has no place for our human selves, all of the things we take to be unique about us. Nevertheless, the world of science is the world of difference-behind-all-difference, cast in new langauges.
Second, religion understood in the broadest sense is an intrinsic part of human thinking. As long as there are humans, there will be myths, legends, superstitions, faith in the supernatural, belief in the afterlife, and so on. Besides the much tighter connection between religion and science, in the spheres of art and imagination we find that the perception of beauty mimics the process of differentiation, but mirrored. Where the intellect seeks unity behind ordinary differences, the aesthetic sense searches for the difference in the ordinary.
The pattern repeats in a third way when we come to the topic of the Self. The existence of human persons capable of acting, these being rather unlike ocean currents or falling rocks, generate a slew of philosophical difficulties. The well-known mind-body problems are a conspicuous sort. But the real interest, Gauchet argues, lies in the paradoxical nature of the self. As an individual ego, we each tend to absorb all concerns into our own. Our world is shaped by our own selfish, narcissistic desires and personal interests. Yet we each tend to seek modes of being which negate the selfish ego. We find such modes in any activity that brings us outside of ourselves, such as the shared rituals of religion, the experience of art or nature, or even participation in cults. The self is at once everything and nothing, this being the real problem of the self which modernity has yet to contend with.
The book is fascinating, a bit too dry and prone to academese, but the arguments are easy enough to parse.
Then something happened, sometime around the 5th century BC, a historical moment that Karl Jaspers would call the Axial Age. The ultimate Other began a gradual process of integration into the human world. Divinity once remote in time began to find its way into human experiences and symbolic systems. From Plato's metaphysics to Jewish and Christian monotheism in the West, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucain systems in the East, history's march began with the slow coming-to-awareness of human beings as beings able to know and shape the world.
The long history of modernity, with its themes of secularization and naturalism, is a story of this growing re-entry of the infinitely different into the spheres of human control. So says Marcel Gauchet.
The disenchantment of the world, a process of "purging the magic" as Max Weber's evocative term Entzauberung indicates, begins not with a Baconian or Galilean-Newtonian revolution. According to that orthodoxy, science and reason obliterated naive superstitions in Europe sometime between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Religion, myth, and faith lie at opposite poles from the supremely rational view of the world espoused by the British, German and French luminaries of those days.
Gauchet proposes a very different view of religion's purpose and indeed its relationship to the sciences. What differentiates modernity from the ancient world is its relationship to the ground of being, not our science or rationality. It is where we seek the ground of being, what we are as individual persons in relation to it, and how we conduct ourselves in the spheres of ordinary action (art, politics, ethics, and so forth).
Gauchet's thesis raises trouble for the now-tired public debates between "science" and "religion". Science means a value free attention to objective reality, the world as it is free of any uniquely human, merely subjective qualities. Religion means a kind of defect, a failure to see behind the appearances to things as they truly are. Provincial, silly, superstitious kinds of belief.
If Gauchet is right, this old bucket will no longer carry water. The orthodoxy misunderstands two central points. First, it fails to see that the scientific point of view itself is not just embedded in the systems of human behaviors, practices, and institutions which originally ordered themselves around the ancient forms of cosmic meaning. Science is a human activity, which is rather obvious, though (proponents of materialism, naturalism, and scientism argue) it differs in that it aims at truth, or objectivity, or the world, or nature, or...
The problem is that whatever term you substitute for the aim or end or purpose of science repeats the same feature we already found in ancient religions, that of the grounding of being beyond time and mind. The very idea of scientific objectivity rests on the metaphysical image of a stable reality existing free of any human qualities, repeating the mythical vision of the world-transcending order founding the ancient faiths. True, the world of science makes for a much stranger, alienated sort of God. It has no place for our human selves, all of the things we take to be unique about us. Nevertheless, the world of science is the world of difference-behind-all-difference, cast in new langauges.
Second, religion understood in the broadest sense is an intrinsic part of human thinking. As long as there are humans, there will be myths, legends, superstitions, faith in the supernatural, belief in the afterlife, and so on. Besides the much tighter connection between religion and science, in the spheres of art and imagination we find that the perception of beauty mimics the process of differentiation, but mirrored. Where the intellect seeks unity behind ordinary differences, the aesthetic sense searches for the difference in the ordinary.
The pattern repeats in a third way when we come to the topic of the Self. The existence of human persons capable of acting, these being rather unlike ocean currents or falling rocks, generate a slew of philosophical difficulties. The well-known mind-body problems are a conspicuous sort. But the real interest, Gauchet argues, lies in the paradoxical nature of the self. As an individual ego, we each tend to absorb all concerns into our own. Our world is shaped by our own selfish, narcissistic desires and personal interests. Yet we each tend to seek modes of being which negate the selfish ego. We find such modes in any activity that brings us outside of ourselves, such as the shared rituals of religion, the experience of art or nature, or even participation in cults. The self is at once everything and nothing, this being the real problem of the self which modernity has yet to contend with.
The book is fascinating, a bit too dry and prone to academese, but the arguments are easy enough to parse.
January 12, 2008
The most important account of the rise of the monotheistic faiths. Blows out of the water the others like Huston Smith (about whom I have many reservations) and Elaine Pagels and Karen Armstrong.
November 2, 2023
Ce livre m'a été suggéré par un ami. C'était une lecture assez difficile et longue, donc je ne connais pas exactement les réponses. A la fin de ma lecture, j'ai fait plus de recherches pour me familiariser avec les idées de l'auteur.
C'est donc après ces recherches que j'écris cette critique. Pour moi, les sujets abordés sont extrêmement intéressants et aussi d'actualité, ils peuvent nous éclairer pour construire les sociétés du 21ème siècle.
Comme je l'ai dit plus haut, la lecture a été difficile, mais les idées de l'auteur sont bien notées dans mes notes pour stimuler mon cerveau par la suite.
C'est donc après ces recherches que j'écris cette critique. Pour moi, les sujets abordés sont extrêmement intéressants et aussi d'actualité, ils peuvent nous éclairer pour construire les sociétés du 21ème siècle.
Comme je l'ai dit plus haut, la lecture a été difficile, mais les idées de l'auteur sont bien notées dans mes notes pour stimuler mon cerveau par la suite.
June 16, 2025
Pourquoi une telle complexité dans les tournures de phrase (doubles negations, phrases à rallonge...)pour la version française ?
Dommage, car le propos, fort intéressant y aurait gagné en fluidité.
Bien que analysant les faits dans le temps long, je serai curieux également de partager avec l'auteur l'évolution depuis les 40 dernières années, et le regain des mouvements religieux à caractère politique.
Dommage également que l'islam ne soit qu'entr'aperçu.
Au final, une lecture ardue qui donne un immense vertige bienvenu sur la place et le rapport au religion, et le passage de la religion au religieux, si pertinent dans l'ultime chapitre.
Dommage, car le propos, fort intéressant y aurait gagné en fluidité.
Bien que analysant les faits dans le temps long, je serai curieux également de partager avec l'auteur l'évolution depuis les 40 dernières années, et le regain des mouvements religieux à caractère politique.
Dommage également que l'islam ne soit qu'entr'aperçu.
Au final, une lecture ardue qui donne un immense vertige bienvenu sur la place et le rapport au religion, et le passage de la religion au religieux, si pertinent dans l'ultime chapitre.
January 6, 2019
A dense examination of the decline of religion as social bond, despite what believers say. He fronts a strange version of the secularization hypothesis in prose obscure enough to be German.
September 8, 2019
A strange meta-narrative of the development of Christianity. All a bit to 'idealist' really. I remain unconvinced. Is this dynamic in the history of ideas really as schematic as Gauchet claims?
January 16, 2016
I found "The Disenchantment of the World" awfully dry, but I was able to gain some things from it. I think that Gauchet's shift from society>religion to religion>society is a good one, and it makes sense. I found myself agreeing with Gauchet when it came to his understanding of how religion shaped the history of the West. Most of all, Gauchet's idea of "society as the subject of itself" is one that I've been thinking about for some time (within a Foucauldian framework). Gauchet offers a systematic look at the history of Western society within religion. If this is what you are interested in, I would highly recommend the book.
There were some negatives. As mentioned the book was quite dry. In addition, I found a couple of things problematic. 1. There is an assumed progressiveness surrounding the history of society. This isn't an assumption that I am comfortable with. It almost suggests a linear quality to history, though I don't believe Gauchet would go so far. 2. There is an assumed progression from nomad to state, which is an assumption which I am very much opposed to. 3. There is an atheistic angle which appears to be assumed. While I didn't find this horrible, it was a little annoying at times.
There were some negatives. As mentioned the book was quite dry. In addition, I found a couple of things problematic. 1. There is an assumed progressiveness surrounding the history of society. This isn't an assumption that I am comfortable with. It almost suggests a linear quality to history, though I don't believe Gauchet would go so far. 2. There is an assumed progression from nomad to state, which is an assumption which I am very much opposed to. 3. There is an atheistic angle which appears to be assumed. While I didn't find this horrible, it was a little annoying at times.
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June 27, 2008Promises to be a balanced study, so far.
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October 2, 2012h/t Guy Fain.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews