Abstract

Marcel Gauchet’s theory of modernity has long been seen through the prism of the sociology of religion and its secularisation theses, which has obscured its central concern: the political, its role in instituting human societies, the forms it has assumed across history. The article explores the continuity of its argumentation from the early works to Gauchet’s recent tetralogy on the history of European liberal democracy with its analysis of the last stage in the evolution of the theologico-political logic, the desacralization of power and the appearance of the new world of neo-liberalism whose intensified structural autonomy pursued through science and technology has paradoxically generated a new form of functional heteronomy.