“The Disenchantment of the World” is one of those rare works that quickly establishes itself as a modern classic. Since its first publication in 1985, it has been regarded as a “political history of religion,” filling a significant gap left by the pioneering works of Durkheim, Max Weber, and Rudolf Otto.

The “religious” has dynamically shaped all societies, including our own, but also more profoundly than it appears, the collective reality and especially the political formations (the forms of the “political”). With “Disenchantment,” Gauchet proposes a reversal of perspective: We have sought to see the history of religions as a development; however, pure religion lies at the origins.

What we call the “great religions” actually corresponds to a series of stages of questioning the religious in its pristine purity. From this perspective, we must assess the revolutionary differentiation, the distinctive difference of Christianity, and its radical role in Western development.

Marcel Gauchet characterizes the becoming of modern societies, from the flourishing of techniques to the establishment of democratic processes, as a movement towards a society beyond religion. Today's world can only be explained by the exit from and inversion of the old religious economy. Its uniqueness is none other than the “disenchantment of the world.”