Claude Lefort

Biography

Lefort became a Marxist in his youth under the influence of his teacher at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By 1943, he was organising a Trotskyist clandestine cell at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. He then studied at the Sorbonne. In 1944, he wrote his Licence ès lettres (roughly equivalent to a B.A.) thesis on Spinoza under Henri Gouhier.

In 1944, he also joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI). In 1946, he met Cornelius Castoriadis who came to Paris from Athens, Greece. Right away, they formed a faction in the PCI called "Chaulieu–Montal Tendency", that left the party and became the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and which, in 1949, started a journal with this name.

Socialisme ou Barbarie considered the USSR to be an example of state capitalism and gave its support to anti-bureaucratic revolts in the Eastern Bloc—especially the uprising in Budapest in 1956. Differences of opinion brought about a schism within Socialisme ou Barbarie, and Lefort sided with Henri Simon, one of the founders of the group Information et Liaisons Ouvrières (ILO; "Workers' Information and Liaisons")—later renamed "Informations et Correspondance Ouvrières" ("Workers' Information and Correspondence")—in 1958. Two years later, he abandoned the idea and ideology of political revolution and ceased his militant activism.

After having worked in other places, in 1947 and 1948 for UNESCO, in 1949 Lefort passed the agrégation in philosophy: he taught at the high school in Nîmes (1950) and in Reims (1951). In 1951, he was recruited as a sociology assistant at the Sorbonne by Georges Gurvitch. In 1952 (following a dispute with Gurvitch), he was detached from the sociology section of the CNRS until 1966, with a break of two years (1953–1954), when he was professor of philosophy at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). As for the CNRS, the support of Raymond Aron (whom he met around 1952) led to his recruitment as a teacher of sociology at the University of Caen, where he worked from 1966 to 1971, the year when he defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Paris I, Le Travail de l'œuvre: Machiavel, which was a commentary on the work of Machiavelli. That same year, he was again hired as a researcher in the sociology section of the CNRS until 1976, when he joined the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where he stayed until his retirement in 1989.

Philosophical work

Conception of totalitarianism

Lefort was part of the political theorists who put forward the relevance of a notion of totalitarianism which was relevant to Stalinism as well as fascism, and considered totalitarianism as different in its essence from the big categories used in the Western world since ancient Greece, like the notions of dictatorship or tyranny. However, contrary to the authors like Hannah Arendt who limited the notion to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1953, Lefort applied it to the regimes of Eastern Europe in the second half of the century, that is, to an era when terror, a central element of totalitarianism for the other authors, had lost its most extreme dimensions.

It is in the study of these regimes, and the reading of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, where he developed his analysis of totalitarianism.

Lefort characterizes the totalitarian system by a "double fence (double clôture). Totalitarianism abolishes the separation between state and society and the political power permeates society, and all preexisting human relations (class solidarity, professional or religious cooperations) tend to be replaced with a one-dimensional hierarchy between those who order and those who obey. This is made possible especially through the association between the state and the party hierarchy which is always very close, so that the party hierarchy becomes the effective power. Lefort, like other theorists, thus identifies the destruction of public space and its fusion with political power as a key element of totalitarianism. Moreover, totalitarianism denies what Lefort calls "the principle of internal divisions of society", and its conception of society is marked by "the affirmation of the totality". Every organization, association or profession is thus subordinated to the planning of the state. The differences of opinion, one of the values of democracy, are abolished so that the entire social body is directed towards the same goal; even personal tastes become politicized and must be standardized. The aim of totalitarianism is to create a united and closed society, in which the components are not individuals and which is defined completely by the same goals, the same opinions and the same practices. Stalinism thus knew the "identification of the people to the proletariat, of the proletariat to the party, of the party to the management, of the management to the 'Égocrate'".

Lefort demonstrates the central difference between totalitarianism and dictatorship: a dictatorship can admit competing transcendental principles, like religion; the ideology of the totalitarian party is religion. A dictatorship does not aim for the destruction and absorption of society, and a dictatorial power is a power of the state against society, that presupposes the distinction of the two; the plan of a totalitarian party is to merge state with society in a closed, united and uniform system, subordinated under the fulfilment of a plan—"socialism" in the case of the USSR. Lefort calls this system "people-one": "The process of identification of power and society, the process of homogenization of the social space, the process of the closing up of society and the authority to enchain it in order to constitute the totalitarian system."

Conception of democracy

Claude Lefort formulates his conception of democracy by mirroring his conception of totalitarianism, developing it in the same way by analyzing Eastern European regimes and the USSR. For Lefort democracy is the form of society characterized by the institutionalization of conflict within society, the division of social body; it recognizes and even considers legitimate the existence of divergent interests, conflicting opinions, and visions of the world that are opposed and even incompatible. Lefort's vision makes the disappearance of the leader as a political body—the putting to death of the king, as Kantorowicz calls it—the founding moment of democracy because it makes the seat of power, hitherto occupied by an eternal substance transcending the mere physical existence of monarchs, into an "empty space" where groups with shared interests and opinions can succeed each other, but only for a time and at the will of elections. Power is no longer tied to any specific programme, goal, or proposal; it is nothing but a collection of instruments put temporarily at the disposal of those who win a majority. "In Lefort's invented and inventive democracy," writes Dominique Colas, "power comes from the people and belongs to no one."

Democracy is thus a regime marked by its vagueness, its incompleteness, against which totalitarianism establishes itself. This leads Lefort to regard as democratic every form of opposition and protest against totalitarianism. Opposition and protest, in a way, create a democratic space within the totalitarian system. Democracy is innovation, the start of new social and political movements, the designation of new issues in the struggle against oppression, it is a "creative power capable of weakening, even slaying the totalitarian Leviathan". A Leviathan whose paradoxical frailty Lefort emphasizes.

Lefort does not reject representative democracy, but does not limit democracy to it. For instance, he includes the social movements in the sphere of legitimate political debate.

Publications

La Brèche, en collaboration avec Edgar Morin, P. Coudray (pseudonym of Cornelius Castoriadis), Fayard, Paris, 1968.

Éléments d'une critique de la bureaucratie, Droz, Genève, 1971. 2nd edition with Gallimard, Paris, 1979.

"The Age of Novelty". Telos 29 (Fall 1976). Telos Press, New York.

Le Travail de l'œuvre, Machiavel, Gallimard, Paris, 1972 (republ., coll. « Tel », 1986).

Un Homme en trop. Essai sur l'archipel du goulag de Soljénitsyne, Le Seuil, Paris, 1975 (republ., Le Seuil, 1986).

Les Formes de l'histoire, Gallimard, Paris, 1978.

Sur une colonne absente. Autour de Merleau-Ponty, Gallimard, Paris, 1978.

L'Invention démocratique. Les Limites de la domination totalitaire, Fayard, Paris, 1981.

Essais sur le politique : XIXe et XXe siècles, Seuil, Paris, 1986.

Écrire à l'épreuve du politique, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1992.

La Complication, Fayard, Paris, 1999.

Les Formes de l'histoire. Essais d'anthropologie politique, Gallimard, Paris, «Folio Essais», 2000.

Le Temps présent, Belin, Paris, 2007.

English translations

The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (MIT Press, 1986).

Democracy and Political Theory (MIT Press, 1989).

Writing: The Political Test (Duke University Press, 2000).

Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007).

Machiavelli in the Making (Northwestern University Press, 2012).

"Proletarian Experience (1952)", Viewpoint Magazine 3 (September 2013).