When he learned that I was to deliver the traditional laudatio when he was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought by the city-state of Bremen in 1999, Claude Lefort reminded me jokingly that his work did not end with Socialisme et Barbarie.1 It was easy to meet that request but harder to write the laudatio, which went through three radically different drafts. The trick is to explain the association of the recipient with the principles behind the award (in this case, with the political thought of Hannah Arendt; this was easy enough); then to explain the great worth of the recipient’s work (which had to be reduced to digestible portions for a general public); and finally to associate oneself and the public in a shared sympathy with the recipient. This last task is the most difficult and explains why my drafts were so different from one another. The solution that I finally adopted was to ask at the outset of the laudatio why it was necessary to bring an American to Germany to praise the work of a French political thinker. Why was Lefort’s work not well known or studied in Germany? There seem to be three reasons: in Germany, moral philosophy has replaced political philosophy, properly speaking; in Germany, politics tends to be reduced to its sociological foundations; and in Germany, given its history, a political thinker for whom democracy is a problem rather than a solution swims against a powerful tide.2 Because the temptation to identify political theory with moral theory or to reduce it to sociology, as well as the idea that democracy is a political remedy for all problems, are not typical only of German intellectual life, it is worth looking more closely at these rather distinctive and provocative philosophical and political standpoints.
Claude Lefort was a student of Merleau-Ponty in high school, became his friend, and joined him at Les Temps Modernes. There, Lefort’s critical articles were published (with some reluctance) until his fierce polemic against Sartre’s philocommunism, which coincided with Merleau-Ponty’s exit from the journal he had cofounded with Sartre. Lefort later edited Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous works The Visible and the Invisible and The Prose of the World. Their shared interests were evident in Lefort’s early philosophical essays on ethnology and sociology, which were later republished in Les formes de l’histoire (1978), and in their interrogation of painting and literature, documented in Lefort’s essays republished in Sur une colonne absente (1978), whose subtitle is Écrits autour de Merleau-Ponty. Lefort adopted and adapted Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological vocation and vocabulary as his own work matured. But the “master” (maître), as Lefort has said, knew how to avoid the “position of a master.” It was Merleau-Ponty who suggested to the young lycéen that with his interests and character he would find it interesting to read Trotsky. The master was right: Lefort became an engaged militant in the Fourth International. His own philosophical adventures with dialectics had begun.
Lefort cofounded (with Cornelius Castoriadis) an oppositional faction within the party before leaving the Trotskyists in 1948 to create the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and the movement whose aims it expressed. This political and intellectual project was unified by its quest for a leftist critique of what its members saw as the bureaucratization of working-class politics, internationally and domestically. To remain within the left in postwar France meant using Marx against the orthodoxy of the party Marxists while insisting on the autonomy of the proletariat as the agent of revolution. The claim of the party to know what is best (i.e., what is “historically necessary”) for the workers led Lefort to criticize Trotsky’s defense of the Soviet Union in spite of Stalin, which Trotsky had based on the ground that the infrastructure of socialism had been created by the nationalization of property in the USSR and the realization of communism depended only on liberation from bureaucratic “excesses.” After Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Lefort’s “Stalinism Without Stalin” showed that the changes proposed were only a modification rather than a serious transformation of the new form of domination that had taken root in the wake of the 1917 revolution. Lefort still applied Marxist categories to his analysis, arguing that the party’s seizure of power followed by its use of that power to transform social relations constituted a new form of class exploitation. After the strikes and protests of the Polish workers, also in 1956, led to a change in party leadership there, the Hungarian revolution the following month seemed to confirm the possibility of autonomous working-class activity. Lefort could still think of his theory as revolutionary because it was in accord with the interests and actions of the proletarian class that had inaugurated these radical actions.
While Lefort could explain the installation of the bureaucracy as a new dominant class in the USSR by his creative use of Marxist categories, this left open the question of why Western workers and intellectuals were blind to this deformation. It posed the more serious question of why they followed their own Communist Parties when no constraint to do so existed. The answer to this question would lead Lefort away from his belief in the essentially revolutionary vocation of the proletariat. A first step had been taken in his devastating critique of Sartre’s 1952 essay “The Communists and Peace.” Lefort had little trouble showing that Sartre misunderstood Marx’s idea of proletarian revolution, and the nicely titled “From the Reply to the Question,” his response to Sartre’s counterpolemic, was even more convincing. But the problem was not philological (although Lefort showed himself to be a superior reader of Marx); Sartre did not see that the question was philosophical. Its most succinct formulation is found in Lefort’s critique of the “method of the progressive intellectuals.” As with the Communist Party that claims to know what is best for the proletariat, these self-defined progressive intellectuals assumed that it was their duty, when the Polish and Hungarian workers asserted their autonomy in 1956, to explain the “political necessity” of the repression of that claim as a result of superior world historical necessities of which the class could not be aware. It was as if the role of the intellectual were to be the mouthpiece of History rather than to voice a critique of injustice and oppression. The philosophical consequence of the appeal to History’s necessities is that the progressive intellectual is incapable of recognizing the new because he denies the possibility of historical creation. A decade later, after May 1968 had undertaken its own historical creation, Lefort published a short article in Le Monde reaffirming this critique against those hoping for a “resurrection of Trotsky” as the positive result of what some thought would be the first step toward a new French revolution.3
Lefort’s understanding of historical creation was phenomenological. In the first phase of his development, the central category was experience: he argued that its richness and ambiguity, its mixture of determination and creativity, could become the basis of the self-organization of the proletariat. Lefort still believed in revolution, and his argument developed the dialectics that could lead to overcoming alienation (positing, for example, that the Stalinist experience could be seen as a stage teaching the proletariat the need to rely only on itself).4 But Lefort’s phenomenological analysis of political experience led to a further conclusion: his comrades at Socialisme ou Barbarie were guilty of the same claim of knowing what is best for others that had been the basis of the critique of Bolshevism.5 After an earlier break in 1952, Lefort finally left the group in 1958, explaining in “Organisation et parti” why he had joined like-minded friends to form a new political group that resolved to put itself at the service of the spontaneity they saw as essential to true revolution.6 But he continued to learn from experience; by 1960 his answer to the question “What is bureaucracy?” recognized that the belief in workers’ self-management was based on the illusion that perfect transparency of motive and action as well as a completed rationality were possible.7 This led in turn to a revision of his earlier phenomenology of proletarian experience. Returning again to Marx—as he has done constantly8—his doubts were confirmed in the 1965 lectures at the Sorbonne in which he analyzed Marx’s move “from one vision of history to another.”9 Despite Marx’s vision of a humanity progressing from one mode of production to another as the class struggle moves toward its climax, a closer reading shows that Marx recognizes the existence of novelty and innovations that no material necessity can explain; such is indeed the case with the advent of capitalism. Whereas previous societies were organized around their own self-preservation, this new social formation differs insofar as it seeks constantly to expand, to innovate, to increase its reach. As Marx himself defines it—for example, in The Communist Manifesto—capitalism is revolutionary; it defiles “all that is holy,” including the customs and traditions that ensured the reproduction of previous social forms. At the same time that it cannot be explained by the preexisting economic infrastructure, capitalism seems to create the material conditions for its own reproduction. In this way, capitalism finds itself doing what traditional societies do (i.e., making possible their own reproduction) even while it is explicitly oriented toward growth and change. How can such a paradoxical society be understood? How can historical creation be explained? What kind of explanation is needed? Read as a philosopher, Marx poses the problem; the solution remains to be found. Lefort came to recognize that it entails a reinterpretation of the nature of politics and the institution of democratic politics.
Lefort’s massive study Le travail de l’oeuvre: Machiavel (1972) and his participation in a collective republication and commentary on La Boétie’s Discours sur la servitude volontaire (1976) seek to unearth the roots, and dangers, of the fascination with the political. He begins from a historical analysis of the “name and representation” of Machiavelli, which serves as a preface to the reconstruction of eight typical and at first convincing interpretations of Machiavelli’s work. Read closely, each of these loses its initial plausibility for the same reason: its pretension to know what Machiavelli really said, or meant to say, or ought to have said. Turning to The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, Lefort clarifies his title: the work (travail) of the oeuvre results from its very indetermination (which is not the same as arbitrariness); the oeuvre retains its power to enlighten just because it cannot be made univocal. Lefort is developing here the intuition that guided his critique of the bureaucratization of politics; the work of the Machiavellian oeuvre constantly undermines any attempt to know, once and for all. There can be no overarching theory (what Merleau-Ponty called a pensée de survol), disconnected from and standing above its object, whose objective existence can be fully known. In the language of phenomenology, the noetic intentional act cannot be united with the noematic object of knowledge. Yet the desire to find such a place, freed from the threat of temporality and the emergence of the new, is constantly present. Moving back to Marx once again, in an essay entitled “The Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies” (1974), Lefort sees that this desire to avoid the threat of the new becomes the secret motivation of what Marx came to understand in his critique of ideology. As opposed to the usual vision that reduces ideology to the contradiction between ideas and the supposedly real or scientific infrastructure, Lefort shows that Marx did not have a fully developed concept of ideology that he applied to an already existing reality; he discovered rather the effects of ideology through his analysis of the new relations of modern society.10 Lefort demonstrates the same process of discovery in Machiavelli, in La Boétie, and, returning to the theme two decades later, in the “modernity” of Dante’s On Monarchy.
Lefort’s studies of centuries past are exercises in reading: reading texts, deciphering signs of what the author sought in vain to master, comparing texts with their later reception, but also reading the supposedly real and the historical novelty that challenges its certainties and calls for interpretation, as it existed for the author but also as it awakens our curiosity by putting into doubt our own certitudes. Each of these interpretive ventures is animated, moreover, by a concern with politics “here and now,” as Lefort repeats on the last page of Machiavel.11
Lefort’s abandonment of the goal of proletarian revolution and its dream of the “good society” did not mean that he accepted the existing political order. Always alert to signs of the new, he rejoined Castoriadis (and Edgar Morin) to publish—in late May ’68, while the strikes were still taking place—Mai 1968: La brèche.12 The next year, he joined his former student Marcel Gauchet on the editorial committee of the journal Textures, in which he published an essay that was the first step in a new stage of his development. “On Democracy: The Political and the Institution of the Social” (1971) was based on notes transcribed by Gauchet from Lefort’s lectures, which Lefort reworked. Reunited with Castoriadis, who also joined the editorial group of Textures, along with Miguel Abensour and Pierre Clastres, both of whom also participated in the collective work on La Boétie, this group founded a new journal, Libre, in 1977. Its ten issues widened and deepened the implications of the earlier critique of totalitarianism that took on a more philosophical cast while opening the investigation of democratic politics as a renewal of critical radicalism. As the new journal was being created, Lefort published in Textures the first part of what became his next book, Un homme en trop (1976), a philosophical reading of Solzhenitsyn’s recently translated and much contested “literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago, a book denounced by many (who read only its first volume) as the expression of a religious reactionary.13 The “excess man” of Lefort’s title refers both to the simple man, the zek imprisoned in the camps who must be separated from a society that seeks to become transparent to itself (or to its rulers) by eliminating not just enemies but “parasites,” and to the “Egocrat” who arrogates to himself a vision of historical necessity and, what is more, the power to imprint it in the real. Lefort’s reading of totalitarianism has now left the flat terrain of sociology; his later readings of Orwell and Rushdie are anticipated by the confrontation with Solzhenitsyn.
Lefort was becoming known to a wider public in a France whose intellectual climate, always heavily influenced by political debate, was beginning a process of change that would overcome the unquestioned hegemony of the Marxist left. He published a collection of the essays that had led him away from Marxism, as Eléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (1971), and another volume, Les formes de l’histoire (1978), that collected his early ethnographic essays together with the fruits of his renewed study of Marx from the transitional period of the 1960s. He had left the University of Caen for a position at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, where his weekly seminars became an influential part of the shifting scenery.14 After another rupture with Castoriadis brought the adventure of Libre to an end, Lefort began writing in Esprit and founded his own journal, Passé-Présent. The title of that short-lived journal suggests one of the unifying themes of Lefort’s work: the presence of the past, like the oeuvre that challenges the certainties of the present.
In the French context, the living past was of course the French Revolution. Lefort’s attraction to the revolution was more complex; he was drawn by the attempts of its nineteenth-century heirs—liberals, such as Guizot; republicans, such as Michelet or Quinet; and democrats, such as Tocqueville—to understand the fundamental indeterminacy that the revolution introduces in the very attempt to interpret it. The oeuvre of these liberal, republican, and democratic readings of the very revolution whose ambiguous presence called for them makes clear a fundamental insight: what is taken to be real is in fact instituted, and—since reality is not caused by some necessity external to it—this institution is symbolic. The roots of this formulation go back to Lefort’s philosophical-ethnological studies from the 1950s that showed the necessity of a shared framework of meaning as the symbolic instance that institutes a society as this society, one in which the licit and the illicit are lawfully regulated in a manner that gives a particular society its unity and sense.15 This symbolic institution can be called “the political,” as distinct from the particular political life that it institutes by making visible what was previously invisible at the same time that, in an apparent paradox that is quite familiar to the phenomenologist, it makes itself invisible as the act of institution. The symbolic function of the political is to institute what a society takes as real. But, as with ideology, to be effective the political has to hide its own creativity from itself.
Lefort had now elaborated the concepts needed to understand the uniqueness of democracy, which he had intuited at the time of his break with Marxism but could not then formulate. The symbolic institution of society in previous social formations depended on an external or transcendent source: gods of various kinds, tradition, or the appeal to the nature of things.16 This external source of legitimation for the social order began to change with the formation of modern monarchies. Lefort turns to Ernst Kantorowicz’s analysis of The King’s Two Bodies, which shows how and why the absolute monarch was understood as incorporating in his mortal body the immortal body of the kingdom. This is the sense of the popular cry “The King is dead; long live the King,” which implies and affirms that society never dies; it reproduces itself over and beyond the actions and the diverse interests of its mortal inhabitants. But the overthrow of the ancien régime institutes a new form of social division; the old hierarchical unity disappears with the monarch, as does the representation of a society whose immortal being and sense could be preserved across space and time. Society is forced to seek its unity from within itself at the same time that its members must take responsibility for their own individuality. But this quest is doomed to failure. Even if society were to succeed in giving itself a government that expressed popular sovereignty, that government would face two equally impossible choices: it could rise above the actual society and (try to) represent the general interest—in which case it would become external to the individuals whom it was supposed to represent; or it could seek to compromise with the plurality of individuals—in which case it would lose the generality that the political institution of shared meanings is supposed to represent. This implies that the institution of democracy neither results from the action of government nor is the expression of the unitary will of the sovereign people. Its institution must remain invisible; its divisions must be made to appear natural, taken for granted. This, again, is a form of ideology—which can now be seen to exist only in democratic societies, which must seek their legitimation within themselves.17 Democracy secretes ideology to hide from itself the radical indeterminacy that is its foundation. It seeks to render innovation impossible, to put an end to history, to hide the basic division of society in a representation of its natural unity. The political implication is that democracy must come to understand that it is based on the recognition of conflict, the admission that the society is divided and must remain divided. The idea of class struggle is thus reformulated as the question of the legitimacy of social division. The overcoming of class division sought by Marx and claimed by totalitarian societies is in fact the elimination of democracy.
Lefort knew of course that his argument for democracy as radical politics would be criticized by those who claim to represent the left. He had taken up their challenge already in the preface to Eléments, pointing out that since power cannot be legitimately exercised by either the government of the moment or the united people, democratic civil society is thereby separated from the state and becomes the basis for a challenge to the totalitarian project. He returns to this issue in the introduction to L’invention démocratique and in an essay in that volume that tries to pinpoint the political role of the “invisible” symbolic institution, “L’impensée de l’Union de la Gauche.”18 How could French Socialists unite with a Communist Party that only paid lip service to the critique of totalitarianism, denouncing so-called excesses as if they were merely regrettable accidents and reproducing in this way what Lefort had previously criticized as the “method of the progressive intellectuals.” The implication of this behavior is not only that the Communists are not committed to democratic politics; despite their professions of democratic faith, the same holds de facto for the Socialists, whose failure to understand was evident in their justification of the alliance. The weight of this critique became apparent a year later, when the National Committee of Solidarity in Poland and dissidents elsewhere in Eastern Europe built their resistance to totalitarianism around the demand for the “rights of man.” How could these “rights,” whose “merely formal” and so-called bourgeois character was famously denounced by Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question,” become the basis of a radical politics? Marx’s critique, Lefort counters, neglects the political dimension of politics; he had no concept of the symbolic institution of society; his Young Hegelian conceptual critique ignored the phenomenology of actual experience. The right to privacy, for example, might well justify private accumulation in capitalist reality, but compared to the arbitrary nature of the absolutist state, this right was in practice the precondition of political action, the ground for freedom of association, the basis on which further rights could be demanded. With this, Lefort takes a step beyond his claim that democracy is made possible by the overthrow of the ancien régime. The institution of such rights from within society, the declaration of what Hannah Arendt (whose work Lefort had not read at the time of his earlier critique of totalitarianism) called “the right to have rights,” is the foundation of democratic politics.
But democratic politics are not instituted once and for all.19 The same revolutionary event that overthrew the visible power of the monarch and made possible the institution of democracy also makes possible totalitarianism, which is not just an extreme form of despotic arbitrariness. Lefort’s 1948 critique of Trotsky had already underlined the implications of Trotsky’s casual remark that while Louis XIV could merely say, “L’état c’est moi,” Stalin’s claim was even more radical: “La société c’est moi.” The analysis of totalitarianism must be reactivated once more.20 The fact that Lenin had defined a Bolshevik as a “Jacobin working for the proletarian cause” (in “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” [1904]) poses the question of the nature of “the revolution in the French Revolution.” Lefort’s answer again points to its inauguration of the world of the modern individual coupled with the destruction of the old, unified hierarchical cosmos. But the revolution was not a single, unified event. Its lurching passage from phase to phase was marked by attempts to bring it to an end; yet that end would have brought with it the elimination of politics, the erasure of social division, and the creation of a new unity.
The modern individualist world can no more be mastered than could be the oeuvre of Machiavelli. What is this modern individualism? Lefort turns to Tocqueville, questioning the passage “De l’égalité à la liberté” in the American context. The usual reading sees equality as what Tocqueville himself called (in his introduction) a “generative fact” founded on the natural equality of conditions on the new continent. This natural equality is said (in volume 1) to at once make possible liberty but also to threaten it; it eliminates hierarchy by making individuals equal, but it thereby produces the tyranny of opinion: the constant love of equality is said to overwhelm the ephemeral desire for liberty and to call for a “tutelary state” that Tocqueville sees as a dangerous and new political formation. But this reading (which relies on volume 1)21 suggests too quickly the kinship of democracy and totalitarianism, as if the former led of its own nature to the latter, such that totalitarianism was not the result of a political choice and struggle.
The simple reading of Tocqueville as predicting a democratic despotism reduces him to a mere sociologist. Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism is that of a philosopher. But its political relevance should be stressed as well, especially after the fall of Communism. Totalitarianism was not historically necessary, but it was not an accident, and its disappearance does not signify the triumph of a pure democracy that only had been waiting to be freed from a repressive state. When the progressive intellectuals finally rallied to antitotalitarianism, they tended to turn away from politics, adopting an ethical absolutism typified by the so-called new philosophers, as if philosophy had to avoid compromise and experience to remain pure. Referring often only implicitly to his contemporaries, Lefort is merciless with their intellectual laziness, moralizing self-satisfaction, unthinking modishness, all combined with a positivism that calls itself science. Yet his readings of the great works of the past (starting with Machiavelli, then Marx, and now Tocqueville) are attentive to what necessarily must escape even the rigorous experience of thought: the indetermination of being, the ambiguity of the relation of liberty and equality, the creativity of history. Addressing a group of new recruits to antitotalitarianism concerning “la question de la démocratie,”22 Lefort points out that while Tocqueville saw the ambiguity of the new democracy—law is strengthened because it appears as the expression of the collective will, but it imposes increasingly uniform norms on individuals within that collectivity—he did not see that this ambiguity is itself ambiguous: as in Lefort’s critique of Marx on the rights of man, Tocqueville forgets that law gives the individual also the right to demand new rights, giving content to democratic demands. Tocqueville’s blind spot may have been due to political prejudice, admits Lefort, but it is also the sign of an intellectual resistance to the uncertain adventure of democracy even in democracy’s most self-critical analyst. But perhaps the fault lies not with Tocqueville but with his reader, whose quest for a scientific interpretation of democracy induced a self-willed blindness. Can the philosopher escape from his own short-sightedness?
Asked to contribute to an English collection entitled Philosophy in France Today, Lefort stressed the question mark in his title: “Philosophe?”23 With his concern with politics, history, literature, and their reciprocal interactions with one another, he doesn’t fit into the usual professional pattern. But what then is philosophy? he is led to ask. He admits that he has no answer. He knows that it can manifest itself in works that do not know that they are philosophy, such as those of Michelet or Tocqueville. But the fact that he has no answer doesn’t mean that the question is vain. What is vain is the claim that the question has disappeared, for that converts an interrogation into an affirmation or, rather, into a negation. In fact, Lefort finds the path to an answer in Tocqueville, as he explains in “Réversibilité: La liberté politique et la liberté de l’individu,” the essay that accompanies the study of equality and liberty that led to his question.24 The author who had the audacity to say that “whoever seeks freedom for something other than itself is made to serve” was curiously unable, says Lefort, to recognize that he who seeks truth for anything other than itself is made to believe—and thus to serve. Lefort could have been speaking of himself. Only as philosophers, convinced not that we have the truth but that the truth is precisely what none of us can have but all of us seek (and are tempted to delude ourselves into thinking we have), can we actively criticize the world in which we live and liberate the signs of the new from the temptation of repetition that is the mark of ideology.