Marcel Gauchet, historian and philosopher: 'Progressivism has locked itself into a denial of uncomfortable realities'
Interview'The '68 Thought' confronted with the Trump moment' (2/6). In an interview with Le Monde, the democracy specialist observes that we are witnessing a major ideological reversal after decades of depoliticization that have allowed neoliberal individualism and 'libertarian societal values' to triumph.
Born in 1946 in Poilley, in France's Normandy region, historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet was the director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and editor-in-chief of Le Débat, a journal he co-founded with historian Pierre Nora, from 1980 to 2020. A student of philosopher Claude Lefort and an early reader of the revue Socialisme ou Barbarie ("Socialism or Barbarism"), Gauchet contributed to journals including Textures and Libre and became a specialist in democracy, to which he devoted the four volumes of his work L'Avènement de la Démocratie ("The Advent of Democracy") between 2007 and 2017.
The author of works on secularization and liberal modernity's "exit from religion" such as The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, and of political analyses such as Macron, les leçons d'un échec ("Macron: Lesson of a Failure"), he published Le Nœud démocratique. Aux origines de la crise néolibérale ("The Democratic Knot: The Origins of the Neoliberal Crisis") in 2024.
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