(An interpretation of) Lefort’s characterisation of democracy (with
additional features by KK)
• basic value of democracy 1: the principle of equality
- the equalisation of conditions
- as a strife to treat everyone as equal (≈ equally valuable as human beings)
- does not exclude differences (due to the fact that people are different) and real inequalities (for
example, due to circumstances, desert and peoples own actions)
• basic value of democracy 2: political freedom (as human right)
- the right to one’s own political opinion, to express that opinion in public and to that this opinion will be
considered part of the political domain of society
- Lefort: political freedom is the positive term of a right to resistance to oppression
- in opposition to the reduction of freedom to the individual, private realm (≈incompatible with democracy)
- contrast: liberalism as reduced to rights of freedom, property and security
- Lefort: this reduction is not compatible with the classic, basic formal principles of liberalism, which
includes the right of resistance to oppression
• basic value of democracy 3: human, individual rights
- life, liberty etc.
- partly reducible to the combination of freedom and equality
• basic value (internal to the concept) of democracy 4: self-determination
- of the people concerning its own issues (political autonomy, internal sovereignty)
- independence of the people in relation to the outside (external sovereignty)
- Lefort: connected with the constitution and institution of a public space
Lefort’s characterisation of democracy
- as form
• basic value (consequential or generative) of democracy 5: freedom/human rights as
demanding/generating the institution of a public space
- “the singular thing about the freedoms proclaimed at the end of the eighteenth century is that they are
in effect indissociable from the birth of the democratic debate. Indeed, they generate it.” (p. 39)
“The negative is effective: it does away with the judge, but it also relates justice to the existence of a
public space – a space which is so constituted that everyone is encouraged to speak and to listen
without being subject to the authority of an another” (p. 41)
- political freedom involves the constitution and institution of a free and open public space, forming an
essential part of the political domain
- a democratic conception of human rights not reducible to only a non-political space of individual right
- Lefort’s claim: internal connection between human rights and the rise of democracy (the democratic
revolution)
Lefort on the symbolic dimension:
• Lefort emphasises the positive and constitutive importance of the symbolic dimension
- symbolic: roughly the same as part of our consciousness, public declarations and speech and a public
culture
- a historically situated general awareness
- may be seen as constitutive of the public culture of a society
- in contrast with: real in some stronger sense: e.g. laws that include sanctions, the concrete aims of
public institutions
- examples: freedom, equality, human rights, democracy
- may of course also be part of the written constitution of a political society
• Arendt on human rights: the paradox of “the right to have rights”
- rights are tied to the existence of some agency protecting rights, for example the existence of a political
society that provides its citizens with such protection
- Arendt: => the right of every human being to be a citizen of a political society acknowledging and
providing the protection of such rights
=> human rights are transformed into citizens rights
- right to have rights => the right of the inclusion of every human being within a political society that
provides the protection of their rights (within the borders of this political society)
=> may be followed by, for example, international agreements between states
• Lefort: the symbolic dimension forms a general constitutive background
- may exist (have a mode of being) stronger than ‘mere declarations’ without consequences: “the rights
of man are not a veil. Far from having the function of masking a dissolution of social bonds which makes
everyone a monad, they both testify to the existence of a new network of human relations and bring it
into existence” (p. 32)
“a symbolic space is established” (p. 33)
Lefort on the symbolic dimension:
“the rights of man are not a veil. Far from having the function of masking a dissolution of social bonds
which makes everyone a monad, they both testify to the existence of a new network of human relations
and bring it into existence” (p. 32)
“a symbolic space is established” (p. 33)
• the constitution and institution of political society involves the the constitution and
institution of a form:
- including both a staging and a sense-giving
- the political society in question cannot withdraw this form without radically changing itself (≈
revolution)
- the symbolic dimension therefore inaugurates a framework ontologically situated between a pure
normative content and a concrete institutional framework (“the flesh of the political”)
normative content of democracy:
- a set of basic values and normative
demands
- moral demands
- as foundation of political society
- ought to orient the construction of the
institutional framework
- may remain abstract in case not
included in the process of selfconstution
normative content of democracy as constitutive form of
a political society
- a set of basic values and normative demands
- that ought to form the basis of the constitution of a political
society
- through a process of self-formation
=> the ontology of a process of self-constitution
Lefort, totalitarianism vs. democracy
• representation of the people-as one
- strives to overcome division and to
institute/constitute the people as a
interconnected whole
- divisions transposed into the friend-enemy
distinction (external or internal enemy)
- the internal enemy is to be eliminated in the
name of the good of society
- the party as representative of the people (≈is
the people)
• power: the embodiment of power in the
totality itself, without distinction
- the party is the people
- the basic principles and aims is the political
society as a whole
- a certain kind of ontologisation
- power is fixed, identity
• thesis: arises out of and as a reaction to
democracy (the form of democracy)
- a political mutation
• plurality, division and conflict constitutive of the
people
- multiplicity of views
- of positions
- the temporal element (new members arriving all the
time)
• basic aspect of staging: the disembodiment of power
- power of the people ≈ power can never be finally
embodied (nowhere and everywhere):
“The modern democratic revolution is best recognized
in this mutation: there is no power linked to a body.
Power appears as an empty place” (“Image of the
Body and Totalitarianism” in The Political Forms of
Modern Society, p. 303)- mortality and temporality of power holders
- everything is contestable
- “no representation of a centre and of the contours of
society” (ibid)
- no master
- identity is open
Lefort, absolutism, totalitarianism, democracy
classic absolutism
• the unity of power is legitimated by
reference to an external authority as
ground:
- religion
- hereditary legitimacy (blood)
- nature
• the establishment of a well-defined
hierarchy
• democracy
• legitimacy of power resides in a constant
debate over legitimacy
- disappearance of marker of certainty
- the seat of power can never be finally
occupied, it is constantly open to contestation
and change
totalitarianism
• the unity of power is legitimated by reference to
an action of filling the void of legitimacy
- absolute values
- historical origins
- religion etc.
• the establishment of a system of total domination
anchored in the values declared, and the specifities
of their interpretation