Product Code Database
Claude Lefort (; ; 21 April 1924 – 3 October 2010) was a French philosopher and activist.
He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose posthumous publications Lefort later edited). In 1944, he joined the Trotskyism Parti Communiste Internationaliste.
Lefort was impressed by Cornelius Castoriadis when he first met him. From 1946, he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu–Montal Tendency, so called after their pseudonyms "Pierre Chaulieu" (Castoriadis) and " Claude Montal" (Lefort). In August 1946, they published "On the Regime and Against the Defense of the USSR", a critique of both Stalinism and the Trotskyist degenerated workers' state theory.Pierre Chaulieu Cornelius, "Sur le régime et contre la défense de l'URSS", Bulletin Intérieur du PCI, no. 31, August 1946, pp. 3–5. They suggested that the USSR was dominated by a social layer of bureaucrats, and that it consisted of a new kind of society as aggressive as Western European societies. By 1948, having tried to persuade other Trotskyists of their viewpoint, they broke away with about a dozen others and founded the libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort's text "L'Expérience prolétarienne" (1952) was important in shifting the group's focus towards forms of self-organization.
For a time, Lefort wrote for both the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and for Les Temps Modernes. His involvement in the latter journal ended after a published debate during 1952–4 over Jean-Paul Sartre's article The Communists and Peace. Lefort was for a long time uncomfortable with Socialisme ou Barbarie's "organizationalist" tendencies. In 1958, he, Henri Simon and others left Socialisme ou Barbarie and formed the group Informations et Liaison Ouvrières.
In his academic career, Lefort taught at the University of São Paulo, at the Sorbonne and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), being affiliated to the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. He has written on the early modern political writers Niccolò Machiavelli and Étienne de La Boétie and explored "the Totalitarian enterprise" in its "denial of social division... and of the difference between the order of power, the order of law and the order of knowledge".
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 Informations et Liaisons Ouvrières (ILO; "Workers' Information and Liaison")—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.Paul Lucardie, Democratic Extremism in Theory and Practice: All Power to the People, Routledge, 2013, Ch. 4: Jacobinland (The New Left, 'autogestion' and council-democracy): "In his later work, Lefort moved further away from Marxism and councilism..."
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.
The intellectual work of Lefort is strongly tied to his participation, often tension-filled, in successive journals. With Les Temps Modernes (introduced to him by Merleau-Ponty), he took part in the "gatherings of collaborators" and wrote from 1945 until his debate with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1953. In Socialisme ou Barbarie (which lasted from 1949 to 1967 and of which he was the co-founder), he was active until 1950, then from 1955 to 1958. He was also involved in the philosophy journal Textures (established in 1969) from 1971 to the end (1975) and there he brought in Castoriadis and Miguel Abensour. With them (as well as Pierre Clastres and Marcel Gauchet), he created the political journal Libre in 1977, which was published up until 1980, when there were some disagreements with Castoriadis as well as with Gauchet. From 1982 to 1984, he led the intellectual review Passé-Present, where, amongst others, Miguel Abensour, Carlos Semprún Maura, and participated. These last two, as well as Claude Habib, formed the reading committee of the book series Littérature et Politique that Lefort founded for the publisher Éditions Belin in 1987.
No doubt he assigned less importance to the research centers at which he had participated in EHESS: the CECMAS (Centre for the Study of Mass Communications), founded by Georges Friedmann and which welcomed Edgar Morin, then the Centre Aron, which he frequented just before his death.
When Merleau-Ponty died in 1961, Lefort took charge of the publication of his manuscripts. In the 1970s, he developed an analysis of bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe. He read The Gulag Archipelago and published a book on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His main ideas on Stalinist totalitarianism were published in 1981 in a collection titled L'Invention démocratique.
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 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."
The division between the interior and the exterior, between the One-people and the Other, is the only division that totalitarianism tolerates, since it is founded upon this division. Lefort insists on the fact that "the constitution of the One-people necessitates the incessant production of enemies" and also speaks of their "invention". For example, Stalin prepared to attack the Jews of the USSR when he died, i.e., designing a new enemy, and in the same way, Mussolini had declared that bourgeois would be eliminated in Italy after World War II.
The relation between the one-people and the Other is a prophylactic command: the enemy is a "parasite to eliminate", a "waste". This exceeds the simple rhetorical effect that was commonly used in the contemporary political discourse, yet in an underlying way, it is part of the metaphorical vision of the totalitarian society as a body. This vision described how the presence of state enemies within the population itself was perceived as a kind of illness. The violence roused against them was, in this organicist metaphor, a fever, a symptom of the fight of the social body against the illness, in the sense that "the campaign against the enemy is feverish: the fever is good, it's the sign, in the society, of the evil to counteract".
The situation of the totalitarian leader within this system is paradoxical and uncertain, for he is at the same time a part of the system (its head, who commands the rest) and the representation of the system (everything). He is therefore the incarnation of the "one-power", i.e., the power executed in all parts of the "one-people".
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 movement 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.
|
|
