The new world of neo-liberal democracy

As Tanguay points out, Gauchet’s normative discussion of liberal democracy’s principles of justice is indeed always contextualised within a narrative framework, which needs to be understood if one wants to evaluate the theoretical dimension of his work and its interpretation of the contemporary crisis of politics. The re-interpretation of liberal democracy stressing the importance of constitutional law encouraged a specifically North American reading of Lefort’s work as primarily a reassertion of French liberalism, which ignored its post-Marxist dimension. Gauchet’s work certainly contributed to the rehabilitation of liberal democracy after decades of its denigration by French Marxists but, his analysis of liberalism is essentially critical, albeit not in the vein that has made many other French political theorists influential in the English-speaking world. The democratisation of liberalism prepared the ideational and social context within which liberal democracy was able to take form after the Second World War.