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36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the major books of the eighties in France. Secularisa, January 6, 1999
This book was published already in 1985 in France and has had an significant influence in intellectual circles. The main argument of Gauchet is that secularisation of society (the word "désenchantement" directly refers to Max Weber's Entzauberaung) is both rooted in christianity and a process against christianity. The christian religion, by laying down the ground for it, made it possible for modern societies (say, after 1789 in France and continental Europe) to abandon heteronomia (government of the society and of the self by an external authority, beit God, tradition, etc...) and to swich to autonomia (in the kantian sense, this is the self government of the individual and of society). Gauchet recently (1998) published a short book on the same theme, La religion dans la démocratie (Ed. Gallimard). Although I quote the theme of the book under "secularisation", Gauchet rejects this concept, precisely because it is too much influenced by the religious "Weltanschauung". He rather speaks of "la sortie de la religion" (the exit of religion). I would say that this book is the book of an anthropologist of Wertern societies rather than of an historian or a philosopher.
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17 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
New and captivating ideas about our past, February 4, 2006
This review is from: The Disenchantment of the World (Paperback)
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". However, like lawyers and their guarded legalese, sociologists have their own vocabulary that could be rendered simple but isn't. In keeping with this tradition Gauchet includes every idea and caveat under the sun by a single period. Destined never to be a best seller, obtuse, bloated lines or paragraphs require multiple re-readings but efforts receive magnificent rewards for insights found nowhere else.
The State is the first religious revolution in history, claims Gauchet. Per Gauchet the original religion - before advent of the city - intended "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. As Gauchet notes with "disenchantment" (leading to our loss of roll in god's creation dictated by the social structure) humans become more autonomous but contradictions arise; the promise of eternal life, but also of life's renunciation (to inhance our image of the next); our promise justified by the god's will, separate from that god, but desirous of fusing with that god. Religion's decline is paid for by the difficulty of individuation. The greater our degree of individuation, the greater our problem of self, the greater interest in past eras when one need not deal with uncertainties this new way provided. What is now experienced as problematic, spiritual systems experienced as resolved.
The State's development, says Gauchet, 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 as before, but God is now for all people, not one group alone. "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.) Though it could use more reference to historical evidence a remarkable book.
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11 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Profound book, but deeply flawed, May 19, 2009
This review is from: The Disenchantment of the World (Paperback)
The main thesis of Gauchet's profound book is that our agnostic, secularized Western world's culture (and its unique values) is a product of, is born from, its predecessor civilization, Christendom. Liberte, egalite, fraternite, are watered down versions of Christian equality, freedom and brother/sisterhood. I call this insight "profound," not because it is new, but because it probes beneath contemporary 'church vs. state' arguments.
However, I had three main complaints with Disenchantment. The first is the title, which coresponds to the contents of the book. Gauchet claims to be writing about the "Disenchantment of the World," and in fact spends some pages on the religions of the world, but the vast majority of the book centers on the the Disenchantment of the Western world. I find this is a typical 'liberal' mistake, to identify the so-called enlightenment-led secularization of western culture to be identical with the whole world, purposely or unintentionally ignoring the 90% rest of the world, which is mostly religious.
Secondly, I object to Gauchet's virtual deification of the state, or as he styles it, the "State," with a capital S, as in french revolutionary and Hegelian/marxist worship of the state. He sincerely seems to believe that entrusting more of our lives to 'the State' does not hamper our freedom, at least not as much as our "subjugation" by [the Christian] religion. I wonder what unfortunate personal experiences Gauchet had with Catholic Christianity to give him such a negative opinion of that faith?
Thirdly, I am a prolific and fairly speedy reader. But I found this book incredibly slow going. I wonder if it was so dense in French, or only so in translation, or was it the font choice of the printer, which had me returning constantly to the beginning of the sentence?
All in all, a deep probing of the relation of religion to Western culture, but to be read with your ears open for ideological indoctrination.
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