He is professor emeritus of the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and former head of the periodical Le Débat.
This decision taken by Nora was, at the time, perceived as an indication of his desire to distance himself from Foucault, especially given Gauchet’s intense criticisms of Foucauldian theories in La pratique de l’esprit humain.
Four years later, in La Révolution des droits de l'homme[11] Gauchet turned to the historiography of the French Revolution in order to analyse the debates around the creation of modern democracy that arose from this historically significant event.
This book of interviews detailed Gauchet’s analysis of the increasing anxiety and pessimism of the French population, in regards to France’s diminished influence in an enlarged European Union, within the context of globalisation.
This book was followed by Comprendre le malheur français II,[19] where Gauchet reconvened with Conan and Azouvi to discuss Emmanuel Macron's term as the president of the French republic.
The sequel, L’Avènement de la démocratie, analyses the genealogy of democratic culture from its positive side; that of humanity’s evolution, the creation of its self-government across time and space, which operates through the production (praxis) of its own becoming as a species, mastered through the law and politics.
The advent of this consciousness is explained in his books on the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis: La Pratique de l'esprit humain, L’Inconscient cérébral,[24] Le Vrai Charcot,[25] as well as his works on education.
It becomes "modern" through a process of metamorphosis which was first encouraged by the liberal upheaval and its deconstruction of the previous regime of meaning encapsulated in the French revolutionary notion of Ancien Régime.
Gauchet and Swain argue that asylums were an incarnation of the modern political utopia where sanity was preserved and individuals were supposedly saved from the brink of insanity.
Foucault postulated that contemporary societies had become increasingly normative, and any stark deviation from the norm would see the “deviant” individual being placed in mental asylums and institutions.
In other words, the asylum functioned to hold the antithetical “insane” individuals who were no longer considered as radically “other” in a type of society that increasingly accepted the idea of ontological equality.
Tracing the genesis of democracy back in history, Gauchet examines the role of hierarchy with that of the traditional framework within which human societies always secured their collective identity and cohesion, which he terms “religion”.
This book extends Gauchet’s central reflections on democratic equality, a theme that already pervaded his two major earlier works, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion[10] and Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe,[8] the latter being co-authored with Gladys Swain.
According to Gauchet, the French Revolution’s idealistic bend, which had its roots in this need to challenge the monarch's considerable authority, birthed a tension, even a contradiction, between the “liberal” and the “collectivist” understandings of democracy.
Six years later, in La Révolution des pouvoirs,[12] Gauchet furthered his analysis by moving away from the question of the founding ideals towards the debates of the national assembly that continued to shape this political experience of representation.
This paradox summarized in the title as the tendency of democratic culture to work against itself, is characteristic of the new situation in which democracy finds itself: whilst it is no longer contested by Marxist critique and now rests on the support of a wide social consensus, the victory of its principles is generating new problems.
It outlines the cultural and intellectual revolution that brought the ideal of autonomy to European societies between the 16th and 19th centuries, and ultimately ushered in the creation of democratic government.
It explores the return of the political triggered by the crisis of liberalism in the form of colonial imperialism and the significance of the first globalisation it paradoxically inspired, in an analysis that leads him to take distance from the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of the period.
These ideologies helped the totalitarian regimes establish their popular legitimacy by grounding themselves in the older religious contexts of spiritual communion, supposedly natural cohesion and hierarchical social order.
In this respect, they were responding to the destabilization of European societies induced by the progress of democratic culture, and reasserted the ideal of an absolute collective unity transcending the aspiration to individual freedom.
The fourth and final volume, Le Nouveau monde,[23] also the longest of the tetralogy, scrutinises the reorientation of societies since the 1970s, the rise of neoliberalism and postmodernity, and their effects on the ideals of Western democracy.
This project of self-reflection requires a deeper understanding of what makes human knowledge possible in order to combat the deintellectualisation encouraged by ultra-modern “structural” autonomy.
Gauchet's book Comprendre le malheur français[36] examines the pessimism that is specific to France, especially in regards to the French population’s perception of their country’s position in Europe and the rest of the world.
When comparing this pessimistic viewpoint with those of a more positive nature, Gauchet brings to light the increasing discordance between the 'elites' and the rest of the population, a dissociation that widens social divisions in French society.
Ultimately, Gauchet scrutinises the role of neoliberalism as a determinant of France’s pursuit of legitimation in the EU, and the pessimism that ensues from the application of this economic and political framework.
In doing so, Macron distanced himself from the far left politics of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far right leader Marine Le Pen, appearing as an ideal centrist politician capable of transcending the left-right divide blamed for having paralysed the country and made it impossible for it to meet the contemporary challenges of globalisation and European economic integration.
Paradoxically, he then revealed himself not to have challenged the dominant elite political consensus of the previous three decades (as first crafted by former presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac — ‘le mitterrando-chiraquisme’), but to have upheld it.
[41] Through Gauchet’s predilection for abstract reconstructions of history from an anthropological perspective, often perceived as symptomatic of Hegelian influence, there is the possibility that Anglo-Saxon readers find his work difficult to comprehend.
As stated in his debate with Badiou[16] his critique is not inspired by a fundamental disagreement over the need to imagine a different kind of society but by an assessment of its political ineffectiveness.
It encourages a pose of intellectual distinction from the rest of society, which appears to be challenging the established order but in reality, does little to destabilise it, not least because it does not provide in depth analyses of the phenomena it seeks to combat and transcend.