Claude Lefort

Career

Lefort becomes Marxist in its youth under the influence of its Master Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but remains critical with respect to the Soviet Union and engages in the movement trotskist. In 1947, it breaks with the trotskism and founds with Cornelius Castoriadis the review Socialisme or cruelty , where it writes under the Pseudonyme of Claude Montal.

It is received with the aggregation philosophy in 1949 and becomes doctor arts and social sciences in 1971.

Within the group Socialism or cruelty, it takes part in a movement of demystification within the Marxisme. Socialism or cruelty regards the USSR as a capitalism of State, and gives its support for the anti-bureaucratic revolts in Europe of the East - in particular to the Insurrection of Budapest in 1956. Divergences bring a scission within Socialisme or cruelty, and Lefort belongs to the founders of Informations and connections working in 1958. It leaves a few years the active militancy later.

At the same time, it starts to work on the work of Machiavel, on which it publishes the Work of work , which leads it to wonder about the division of the social body, the diversity of opinion and the democracy. Of 1976 with 1990, he is director of studies to the École of the high studies in social sciences.

In the Years 1970, it develops an analysis of the bureaucratic modes of Eastern Europe. It reads the Gulag Archipelago and publishes a book on Alexandre Soljenitsyne. Its principal designs on Stalinist totalitarianism are published in 1981 in a collection entitled the democratic Invention .

Design of totalitarianism

Lefort belongs to the theorists of the policy which postulate the relevance of a concept of Totalitarisme of which raise the Stalinisme like the Fascisme, and regard totalitarianism as different in its gasoline from the main categories used by the western world since the ancient Greece, like the concepts of Dictature or Tyrannie. However, contrary to the authors as Hannah Arendt who limit the concept to the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1953, Lefort the bracket with the modes of Eastern Europe in second half of the century, i.e. at one time when the Terreur, an central element of totalitarianism in other authors, had lost his paroxystic dimension.

It is being studied as of these modes, and the reading in particular of the Gulag Archipelago (1973) of Alexandre Soljenitsyne, which it developed his analysis of totalitarianism. Without theorizing it in a unified work, it published in 1981 pennies the title the democratic Invention. Limits of the totalitarian domination a collection of articles published between 1957 and 1980.

The double fence of the company

Lefort characterizes the totalitarian system by a double “fence”:

totalitarianism abolishes separation between the State and the company: the political Pouvoir irrigates the company, and all the preexistent human relations - solidarity of class, co-operation religious Profession nelle or - tend to being replaced by a unidimensional Hiérarchie between those which orders and those which obey. This is allowed, in particular, by association increasingly narrower between the administration of the State and the hierarchy of the party, the latter becoming the effective capacity. Lefort, like other theorists, identifies thus the destruction of the Public space and its fusion with the political power like a element-key of totalitarianism.
totalitarianism denies what Lefort calls “the principle of internal division of the company”, and its design of the company is marked by “the assertion of totality”. Any organization, association or profession are thus subordinated to the project of the State. The diversity of the opinions, one of the values of the Democracy, is abolished so that all the social body tends towards the same goal; even the personal tastes become policy objects and must be standardized. The goal of totalitarianism is to create a unified and closed company, whose components are not individuals and are defined all by the same goals, the same opinions and the same practices. Stalinism knows it thus identification of the people to the proletariat, the proletariat to the party, the party to the direction, the direction in Égocrate. (Lefort 1981, p. 175)

Lefort thus shows the great difference of totalitarianism with the Dictature: a dictatorship can admit the competition of transcendent principles, like the Religion; the ideology of the totalitarian party is religion. A dictatorship does not aim to the destruction and the absorption of the company, and a dictatorial capacity is a capacity of the State against the company, which supposes their distinction; the project of a totalitarian party is to merge with the State and the company in a closed, unified and uniform system, subordinated to the realization of a project - “socialism” in the case of the USSR. Lefort calls this system the “people-A”: “The process of identification between the capacity and the company, the process of homogenization of social space, the process of end of the company and the capacity is connected to constitute the totalitarian system. ” ( ibid , p. 103)

The vision organicist of the company

The totalitarian, unified and organized system, is presented in the form of a body, the “body social”: “dictatorship, bureaucracy, apparatuses need a new system of body” ( ibid , p. 109). Lefort takes again the theories of Ernst Kantorowicz on the “two bodies of the king”, in what the person of the totalitarian chief, beyond her physical and mortal body, is a body politic appearing the people-A.

In order to ensure its good performance and to preserve its unit, the totalitarian system require a Other , “the Other maléfique one” (Lefort 1981, p. 176), a representation of outside, the enemy, what the party fights, “the representative of the forces of the old company (kulaks, middle-class), the emissary from abroad, the world imperialist” ( ibid , p. 173). Division between the interior and outside, the people-A and the Other, is the only division which totalitarianism tolerates, because it is based on it. Lefort insists on the fact that “the constitution of the people-A requires the ceaseless production of enemies” ( ibid , p. 173) and speaks even about their “invention”. For example, Stalin was on the point of attacking the Juif S of the USSR when he died, i.e. to designate a new enemy; in the same way, Mussolini had declared that the middle-class would be eliminated from Italy after the Second world war.

The relation between the people-A and the Other is of a prophylactic nature : the enemy is a “parasite to be eliminated”, a “waste”. This exceeds the simple rhetoric effect usually used in the contemporary political discourse, although in a subjacent way, and takes part of the metaphorical vision of the totalitarian company like a body. This vision explains why the existence even enemies of the State and their presence within the people is seen like a Maladie. The Violence unchained against them is, in this metaphor organicist, a fever, a symptom of the combat of the social body against the disease, in the sense that “the countryside against the enemy is feverish: the fever is good, it is the signal, in the company, of the evil to be fought. ” ( ibid , p. 174)

The situation of the totalitarian chief within this system is paradoxical and dubious, because it is at the same time part of the system - the head, which orders with the remainder - and the representation of the system - the whole. It is thus the incarnation of the “capacity-A”, i.e. the capacity exerted in all the parts of the “people-A”.

The brittleness of the system

Lefort does not consider totalitarianism as a idealtypic situation quasi which would be likely to be realized by terror and the extermination. It sees a whole of process rather there, not being able to know of end and thus of success. If the will of the totalitarian party to carry out the perfect unit of the social body orders the width of its action, it also implies that its goal is impossible to reach, because its development involves necessarily contradictions and oppositions. Totalitarianism is a mode whose register is to be corroded by the nonsense of its own ambition (total control by the party) and by the passive resistance or activates those which are subjected to him , the political economist Dominique Colas summarizes (Colas 1986, p. 587)

Design of the democracy

Claude Lefort forms his design of the Démocratie to the mirror of his design of totalitarianism and also developed it with its analyzes of the modes of Eastern Europe and the the USSR.

The democracy at Lefort is the mode characterized by the institutionalization of the Conflit within the company, of the division of the social body; he recognizes, and even legitimates, the existence of divergent interests, contrary opinions, opposite and even incompatible visions of world.

The vision of Lefort makes disappearance of the body politic of the chief - the setting with died of the king, at Kantorowicz - one moment founder of the democracy, because it makes place of the capacity, occupied before by an eternal substance transcending the simple physical existence of the monarchs, a “empty place”, which can follow one another, but only for a time and with the liking of the elections, opinion competitors and lobbys. The capacity integrates any more any defined project, no goal, no plan; it is only one whole of instruments, placed temporarily at the disposal of those which gain the majority. In the invented and inventive democracy of Lefort, writing Dominique Colas, the capacity emanates from the people and it is not the capacity of anybody. (Colas 1986, p. 589)

The democracy is thus a mode marked by its indetermination, its incompletion, it against what sets up totalitarianism.

This leads Lefort to be regarded as “democratic” any form of opposition and protest vis-a-vis to totalitarianism, the opposition and the protest creating, to some extent, a space of democracy within the totalitarian system. The democracy is invention , opening of new mobilizations designation of new stakes in the fight against oppression, it is one creative power able to shake, even to cut down totalitarian Léviathan (Colas 1986, p. 586), Léviathan whose Lefort underlines paradoxical brittleness.

The separation of the Civil society of with the State, which characterizes the modern democracy, is allowed by this disembodiment of the company. A democratic country also knows this inventive character, because any group of citizens, by a legitimate fight, can seek to make establish new rights or defend its interests. Lefort does not reject the Representative democracy, but does not limit the democracy there, including for example the social movements in the sphere of the legitimate political debate.

Publications

the Breach , in collaboration with Edgar Morin, P. Coudray (pseudonym of Cornelius Castoriadis), Paris, Beech, 1968.
Elements of a criticism of the bureaucracy , Paris, Droz, 1971.
the Work of work, Machiavel , Paris, Gallimard, 1972 (republished coll “Such”, 1986).
a Man in excess. Test on the Gulag Archipelago de Soljénitsyne , Paris, the Threshold, 1975 (republished, the Threshold pocket - 1986).
the Forms of the history , Paris, Gallimard, 1978.
On a column goes away. Around Merleau-Ponty , Paris, Gallimard, 1978.
the democratic Invention , Paris, Beech, 1981.
Tests on the policy: XIXe-XXe centuries , Paris, Threshold, 1986.
To write the policy proof, Paris, Calmann-Levy, 1992.
the Complication , Paris, Beech, 1999.
Forms of the history. Tests of political anthropology , Paris, Gallimard, “Folio Tests”, 2000.
Time present , Paris, Belin, 2007.

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