Claude Lefort
Claude Lefort was a French philosopher and activist.
He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 1944, he joined the Trotskyist 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" and "Claude Montal". 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. 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" 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, 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... of the difference between the order of power, the order of law and the order of knowledge".
Biography
Lefort became a Marxist in his youth under the influence of his teacher at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. By 1943, he was organising a Trotskyist clandestine cell at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. He then studied at the Sorbonne. In 1944, he wrote his Licence ès lettres thesis on Spinoza under Henri Gouhier.In 1944, he also joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste. 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 —later renamed "Informations et Correspondance Ouvrières" —in 1958. Two years later, he abandoned the idea and ideology of political revolution and ceased his militant activism.
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 and in Reims. In 1951, he was recruited as a sociology assistant at the Sorbonne by Georges Gurvitch. In 1952, he was detached from the sociology section of the CNRS until 1966, with a break of two years, when he was professor of philosophy at the University of São Paulo. As for the CNRS, the support of Raymond Aron 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, 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, 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, he was active until 1950, then from 1955 to 1958. He was also involved in the philosophy journal Textures from 1971 to the end and there he brought in Castoriadis and Miguel Abensour. With them, 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, 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.
Philosophical work
Conception of totalitarianism
Lefort was part of the political theorists who put forward the relevance of a notion of totalitarianism which was relevant to Stalinism as well as fascism, and considered totalitarianism as different in its essence from the big categories used in the Western world since ancient Greece, like the notions of dictatorship or tyranny. However, contrary to the authors like Hannah Arendt who limited the notion to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1953, Lefort applied it to the regimes of Eastern Europe in the second half of the century, that is, to an era when terror, a central element of totalitarianism for the other authors, had lost its most extreme dimensions.It is in the study of these regimes, and the reading of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, where he developed his analysis of totalitarianism.
The double fence society
Lefort characterizes the totalitarian system by a "double fence. Totalitarianism abolishes the separation between state and society and the political power permeates society, and all preexisting human relations tend to be replaced with a one-dimensional hierarchy between those who order and those who obey. This is made possible especially through the association between the state and the party hierarchy which is always very close, so that the party hierarchy becomes the effective power. Lefort, like other theorists, thus identifies the destruction of public space and its fusion with political power as a key element of totalitarianism. Moreover, totalitarianism denies what Lefort calls "the principle of internal divisions of society", and its conception of society is marked by "the affirmation of the totality". Every organization, association or profession is thus subordinated to the planning of the state. The differences of opinion, one of the values of democracy, are abolished so that the entire social body is directed towards the same goal; even personal tastes become politicized and must be standardized. The aim of totalitarianism is to create a united and closed society, in which the components are not individuals and which is defined completely by the same goals, the same opinions and the same practices. Stalinism thus knew the "identification of the people to the proletariat, of the proletariat to the party, of the party to the management, of the management to the 'Égocrate'".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 organicist vision of society
The totalitarian system, unified and organized, presents itself like a body, the "social body": "dictatorship, bureaucracy and apparatus need a new system of bodies". Lefort returns to the theories of Ernst Kantorowicz on the "two bodies of the king", in which the person of the totalitarian leader, besides his physical and mortal body, is a political body representing the one-people. In order to ensure its proper functioning and to maintain its unity, the totalitarian system requires an Other, "the evil other", a representation of the exterior, the enemy, against which the party combats, "the representative of the forces of the old society, the emissary of the stranger, of the imperialistic world".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 and the representation of the system. He is therefore the incarnation of the "one-power", i.e., the power executed in all parts of the "one-people".