Abstract

Summary In this interview, The Idea of the History of the Subject, first published in French in 2003, the philosopher Marcel Gauchet offers a succinct account of the interdisciplinary project that lies at the heart of his own lifework as well as that of a number of his fellow intellectual travelers, especially in France. This is the attempt to articulate the conditions of modern selfhood and subjectivity, and to understand these in relation to the ever-changing yet always social nature of human beings in general. In an earlier book, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Gauchet described the gradual..