Claude Lefort (1924 – 2010)
Publications and translations
Le Travail de l'œuvre, Machiavel, 1972, Machiavelli in the Making, 2012
Les Formes de l'histoire. Essais d'anthropologie politique, 1978
L’Invention démocratique, 1981
Essais sur le politique : XIXe et XXe siècles, 1986.
The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, 1986
Democracy and Political Theory, 1989
Écrire à l'épreuve du politique, 1992, Writing: The Political Test, 2000
La Complication, 1999, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, 2007
Le Temps présent, 2007.
Backgrounds:
- student of Merleau-Ponty (1940’ onwards), editor of his posthumous works
- member (1948-58) of ‘libertarian socialist’ group Socialisme ou Barbarie, mainly lead by Cornelius
Castoriadis
Why Lefort?
- to a certain extent highly influential on the contemporary debate: Laclau & Mouffe, Rancière etc.
- for its own sake: posing a today highly important issue: what is the essence of democracy?
Lefort: political philosophy
• a return to political philosophy
- its classic questions
- especially a focus on what he calls the form of political society, as constitutive of the whole of society
- descriptive characterisations of these forms
- and deep-going analysis of constitutive aspects of political society
• phenomenological?
- a phenomenology of the political as constitutive form (≈ political ontology)
- seldom refers to the phenomenological mode of thinking, lots of references to Merleau-Ponty
- the specific forms themselves historical
- the necessity of having a form general? (at least insofar as there is political society)
• normativity in Lefort?
- fierce defence of democracy, at least on the level of the general form of society
=> distinction between the general form and particular institutional settings
=> opens up the question “What is democracy?”
- in Lefort democracy is contrasted, in different ways, from classical absolutism, modern totalitarianism
and the liberalist interpretation of democracy
- liberalism/democracy as political theory: emphasises the primacy of liberal rights to democracy or
democracy as instrumental
- normative justifications? (at least in a conditional mode: if democracy is a good thing, then …)
- political philosophy:
“Someone who practices [political philosophy] cannot yield entirely to the illusion that he is removed from
his own time … from the sense of a future that eludes his knowledge and that both excites his
imagination and brings him back to an awareness of his limits” (Writing, p. xli)
Lefort: political philosophy
• a return to political philosophy
- especially a focus on what he calls the form of political society, as constitutive of the whole of society
• the political: the (specific) formation (mise en forme) or regime that is constitutive of and conditions
societal life
- taken as a whole
- not a specific and separate section of society
• compare Arendt: the political as a sphere of freedom above and partly independent of taking care of
the necessities of life
- and of the social as administration of everyday life in common
=> Arendt: politics as free communicative interaction on basic common issues
• Lefort: modern society as a division of spheres:
- economic, juridical, social, private, political
- thesis: this division conceals what is constitutive of the form of society as a whole
- in addition: this form is partly constitutive of these very divisions themselves?
• Lefort on the political: the constitutive form of a society
- different forms in different societies => plurality of forms
- still: general forms!
- carriers of some general idea?
=> typology of forms of political society
- democracy, totalitarianism etc.
- the focus on such forms enables us to distinguish between the most fundamental differences between
societies and the fundamental questions of of choices
Lefort, forms of society
• the political: the (specific) formation (mise en forme) or regime that is constitutive of
and conditions of societal life
- taken as a whole
staging (mise en scène)
sense giving (mise en sens)
• the overall structure of the form
- including its basic principles, values etc.
- the modes of thinking that define, condition and
orient this form
- constitutes a space of intelligibility
- institutes divisions of just-unjust, true-false,
normal-pathological etc.
- ideology?
- or the modes of thinking inherent in certain
practices?
• partly analogous to the construction of a
theatrical stage
- ramification, borders
- basic set-up and organisation
• the staging of a political society
- borders and their definition: nation-stateborders, definition of the people etc.
- the set-up of the mode of power
(democracy, totalitarian etc.)
- institutional organisation
compare Foucault:
- forms of power
- constitutes themselves as power partly by means
of a structuring of intelligibility, partly in terms of
distinctions and divisions
- Lefort: the political as form is not reducible to a
form of power that produces and subjugates!
Lefort, some major claims
• the uniqueness of democratic society to other forms
“… democracy … inaugurates a history which abolishes the place of the referent from which the law
once derived its transcendence” (Democracy and Political Theory, p. 39)
- in other words: lack/abolishment of a secure foundation
- “the disappearance of markers of certainty”
- “.. the division between legitimate and illegitimate … is simply removed from the realm of certainty”
(p. 39)
• main general background thesis:
- the political order of a society lack any possibility to secure a foundation outside of its own
constitutive process
- in many cases throughout human history attempts have been made to claim the existence of a
secure or external foundation
political order
- the constitution and institutionalisation of a
organised unity
- often involves a set of foundational principles
and a power hierarchy
- the foundational principles in part function to
legitimise the political order
- basic question: how do we justify or ground
such principles
- or: which principles can actually be justified in a
sufficiently well-grounded manner
society?
- a more or less tightly organised interaction between
human beings: division of labor etc.
- Hegel: civil society
- a society may be anarchic (≈ lack an established
order with a centre and a hierarchical power
structure)
Lefort, some major claims
• the uniqueness of democratic society to other forms
“… democracy … inaugurates a history which abolishes the place of the referent from which the law
once derived its transcendence” (Democracy and Political Theory, p. 39)
- in other words: lack/abolishment of a secure foundation
- “the disappearance of markers of certainty”
- “.. the division between legitimate and illegitimate … is simply removed from the realm of certainty”
(p. 39)
• main general background thesis:
- the political order of a society lack any possibility to secure a foundation outside of its own
constitutive process
- in many cases throughout human history attempts have been made to claim the existence of a
secure or external foundation
- nature
- religious foundation
- heritage (monarchy)
thesis: these are all historically situated and human constructs
≈ lack any foundation outside themselves
- Lefort: co-foundational: the foundation and the institutionalisation of a certain regime is one and the
same thing (≈ the foundation is created in the act itself)
- post-metaphysical thinking, post-foundationalism
• compare: the social contract-tradition: in-between foundationalism and post-foundationalism
- the political order as contract between the citizens, the fondations of this contract often sought
outside: natural law, basic inalienable rights, reason, a general moral foundation
Lefort, some major claims
• the uniqueness of democratic society to other forms
“… democracy … inaugurates a history which abolishes the place of the referent from which the law
once derived its transcendence” (Democracy and Political Theory, p. 39)
- in other words: lack/abolishment of a secure foundation
- “the disappearance of markers of certainty”
- “.. the division between legitimate and illegitimate … is simply removed from the realm of certainty” (p.
39)
• democracy is a form where the locus of power remain empty
- ”the locus of power becomes an empty place”
- in comparison with other forms democracy defines itself in terms of the impossibility for anyone in
particular to fully (spatially and temporally) embody power
- power of the people: in principle anyone at anytime belong to the people
- may legitimately claim to be a part of the people
- the category of the people: lacks absolute foundation, must be constructed through a process
- new persons arrive all the time (the newly born, the immigrant etc.)
=> the importance of elections as part of democracy
- “a regime founded upon the legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate – a
debate which is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end” (p. 39)
• general diagnostic thesis:
- the importance for most democratic regimes to conceal the lack of a certain foundation and the
ontological emptiness of the seat of power
- democracy is inherently haunted by insecurity (already on the level of principles)
=> threat: the risk of the appearance of ’fulfillers’ of the foundation: appeal to a return to a transcendent
origin or foundation (historic people, morality, religion, charismatic authority etc.)