Is Anti-totalitarian Theory Still Relevant? The Example of Claude Lefort

Introduction

The two indisputably totalitarian regimes that exercised power during the 20th century no longer exist: one was killed during a war that it had itself provoked, a victim of the death wish at the foundation of its nihilism; the other succumbed after a senescent old age during which an enfeebled central core increasingly fell victim to national particularisms. Polemicists continue to detect traces of a contemporary revival of both forms; for example, in Russian denunciations of neo-Nazis in Ukraine that invoke the memory of the Great Patriotic War, or in the rhetoric employed in denunciations of ‘wokeism’ in liberal democracies like France that harks back to Orwellian images of communist thought police. ¹ Nonetheless, it is not necessary to ransack historical memory to warn of storm clouds on the horizon. The threats appear to define a gradation beginning with the emergence of so-called illiberal parliamentary regimes in some former communist nations such as Poland and Hungary. ² More radical variants of this type of regime may add a caesarist style as in Erdogan’s Turkey or increasingly Modi’s India. A different variant is offered by Latin American cases such as Maduro’s in Venezuela and Ortega’s Nicaragua, which claim to renew a form of socialist democracy whose legitimacy is based ultimately on its rhetorical if ineffective anti-imperialism. The list could be extended, and refined, but never be complete and definitive.

Comparative analysis of regime types will never be able to implant the final cross or produce the death certificate of totalitarianism. If it is indeed resurgent, it may appear to be just another of the possible forms of political regime. Yet the theorists of the two totalitarianisms of the 20th century agreed that they represented something historically different, a new form of rule, that can be described by the paradoxical figure that I call an anti-political politics. A different type of analysis of the figures of the political in a modern democracy is needed in order to avoid its use as an ideological legitimation of ‘illiberal’ regimes which make a show of obedience to the formal procedures of electoral democracy but deny not only its substance but its openness toward new forms of political participation. The binaries of the 20th century – the antitheses of totalitarianism and democratic liberalism – no longer suffice; the renewal of the concept of the political needed to avoid anti-politics has to face the question of whether anti-totalitarian theory is relevant in the new century. Without forgetting the lessons of the recent past, a future-oriented analysis must be critical and self-critical as it threads its way through the labyrinth of historical, sociological, and philosophical accounts of modernity with an always open eye to the new possibilities of politics. I take the work of Claude Lefort as exemplary of this project.

For analytic purposes, I will distinguish three distinct phases in the development of Lefort’s thought. His first, Marx-inspired critique of totalitarianism began in the postwar years when he was an active participant in a dissident Trotskyist party called Socialisme ou Barbarie. A philosophical interlude of over a decade followed his abandonment of party politics, during which Lefort edited two posthumous manuscripts of his teacher, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, while completing work on his doctoral dissertation, published in 1971 as Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel. It would not be misleading to say that this was the period when Lefort came to appreciate politics as a good for itself rather than as an activity dependent on a material conjuncture, as a prelude to revolution and as a means rather than an end for itself. A third moment in Lefort’s theory can be dated from his contribution to La brèche, a volume in which Lefort’s text appeared along with essays by Edgar Morin and Cornelius Castoriadis to provide an immediate interpretation of the ‘events’ of May 1968 while they were ongoing. Building from the cathartic experience of the French spring and its echoes across the globe, Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism began to open toward a theory of modern democracy that he would widen and deepen over the next decades in the face of new political challenges. In a word, these three phases describe the development of Lefort’s interrogation of the relation between politics and the political.

Before advancing further, I want to call attention here to the distinction (and to the interdependence) of the political from the activity of politics. As a substantive noun ‘the political’ establishes the framework within which political action acquires a sense or meaning distinct from the immediate intentions or interests of the individual actors. ³ For example, in recent times, identical demands by minorities, women or local associations may fall on deaf ears if the framework that defines the political is not receptive to their particular demands, which are dismissed as nonsense, utopian, or as making no sense. This definition may appear circular, leaving no place for intentional actions that seek to transform the framework of the political; however, the possibility of revolution, which remained on the agenda during the postwar and Cold War years, reappeared vividly in the wake not only of the events of May 1968 but also (less distinctly) in the final phases of decolonization.

Lefort wrestled with the implications of this challenge, which had also become apparent within the Soviet bloc during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and again in the other rupture of 1968, the Prague Spring, and its repression by Soviet troops in August. These developments showed that a change in ‘the political’ was indeed possible. The philosophical foundation of this kind of change became a contested issue particularly in France where the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago found echoes among former participants in the May 1968 revolts. Questions were posed as well by the formation of the Polish provisional government created under pressure from the independent trade union, Solidarnosc. In this context, Lefort published a collection of his essays from this period whose title, L’invention démocratique et les limites du totalitarianism, expressed his new understanding of the political as both limiting the reach of totalitarian anti-politics and as offering a new political framework that is not simply the product of material conditions. Democracy is an invention that reveals totalitarianism to be a form of anti-politics, which is both a limitation of the visible forms of domination and the promise of still invisible types of freedom that lie over-the-horizon. Lefort knew that limits remained; and indeed the Polish experiment was cut short by a coup d’état. But the tension of the inventiveness of democracy and the anti-politics of totalitarianism would continue even after 1991, when the Soviet Union and the Communist Party regime breathed its last.

Another preliminary consideration bears mention here at the outset. All the works that will be considered in my reconstruction of Lefort’s first critique of totalitarianism were essays, which Lefort selected for publication in the volume Eléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (1971). One sentence in Lefort’s preface to that early collection of his essays from this first stage should be underlined. ⁴ He admits that his theory is incomplete, as his title indicates, but he explains that ‘my older analyses gave me the power to go beyond their limits’. Indeed, Lefort never claimed to have developed a general theory that was universal, complete and synthetic. Although he published the 700 plus pages of his doctoral dissertation in a single volume, his Machiavel (Lefort, 1971), which I discuss here as an ‘interlude’, it remained an exception among his works. ⁵ Lefort was always what the French call ‘un homme des revues’, a thinker who drew critical stimulation from working with others (without searching necessarily for collective solutions). He was long associated with the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and in his youth briefly with Les Temps modernes; after 1970 he joined the editorial group of Textures and then continued to work with many of its editors on Libre, before creating his own bi-annual publication, Passé-Présent. Later he was informally associated with the monthly Esprit during the editorship of Paul Thibaud, a collaboration that he continued with Olivier Mongin as director of the journal. His final book, published in 2007, brought together, without comment, more than 1000 pages of previously published but uncollected essays under the revealing title Le temps present. Ecrits 1945–2005 (Lefort, 2006). As mentioned, Lefort’s titles for these essay collections are often well-chosen brief distillations of the problems addressed, this one asserting implicitly that the exploration of the figures and avatars of totalitarianism remain on the agenda today just as they had over the years. The author of these lines could not agree more. ⁶

I Lefort’s First Critique of Totalitarianism: The Aporia of Marxist Politics

Born in Paris in 1924 to a single Jewish mother who would refuse to wear the yellow star of David during the Occupation, Lefort was sensitive early to forms of political domination. This sensitivity was evident in his early criticism of Soviet forms of communism, but also in his relation to his philosophy professor at the lycée Condorcet, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had partnered with Sartre as founding editors of the journal Les Temps modernes. ⁷ Invited to participate in that journal, Lefort published several articles on political themes as well as a major essay revealing what he called ‘La contradiction de Trotsky’ in December 1948. It is not surprising that the young Lefort had become a Trotskyist during the Occupation, nor that at the time of this critical essay he had joined with Cornelius Castoriadis to organize an independent oppositional party within the Fourth International that published its own eponymous journal, Socialisme ou Barbarie. Early in the 1950s, as Sartre sought a Marxist veneer for his existential philosophy, particularly in the long article of 1952 (‘Les Communists et la paix’), Lefort, with the encouragement of Merleau-Ponty, published a critical reply, to which Sartre in turn replied vehemently (viciously and personally); Lefort’s rebuttal did not yield an inch as he countered with his own challenge to Sartre, proposing to return ‘De la réponse à la question’. ⁸ This episode suggests that the starting point for what I am calling Lefort’s ‘first critique’ of totalitarianism developed first as an internal critique within the categories of Marxism before ultimately abandoning the certitudes of orthodoxy but without ceasing to mine Marx’s works for new critical insights. What Lefort had abandoned after more than a decade of engagement was Leninism’s justification of the role of the revolutionary party as the thinking brain and organizational genius necessary for the realization of the revolution.

In addition to his philosophical studies, which culminated with the agrégation, Lefort continued to deepen his understanding of Marx. His cooperation with Cornelius Castoriadis, a Greek émigré philosopher who was working as an economist at the Paris headquarters of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), helped him deepen his understanding of both the immanent contradictions of the Soviet economy and the Trotskyist political opposition to Stalinism. They both criticized Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism for reducing the bureaucratic domination of the Communist Party to a merely political, and therefore temporary, and accidental deformation that had left unchanged the material relations of production that had (supposedly) been socialized after the abolition of capitalist forms of property after the 1917 revolution. Trotsky’s interpretation assumed that political forms (called ‘super-structures’) had distorted the new and still solid economic infrastructures; as a result, the Soviet working class was alienated and therefore incapable of autonomous activity. Adopting their own position, the activists of Socialisme ou Barbarie proposed to interpret Soviet relations of production as the result of the emergence of a new type of social division based on the distinction between those who give orders (the dirigeants) and those who must obey them (the exécutants). Whereas the Marxist theory of revolution was based on the opposition between capitalist owners of the means of production and proletarian laborers with ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, the principal opposition in Russia had been transformed; now the revolutionary party had become a bureaucratic ruling class exploiting the labor of the working class. ⁹ This was in effect the basis of Trotsky’s early criticism of Stalinism.

Socialisme ou Barbarie went further than Trotsky, whose criticism of the Stalinist bureaucracy remained within the framework of Marxism, for example when he denounced it as a ‘parasite’ appropriating the economic surplus produced by the workers to whom it should rightfully belong. Asking themselves why this exploitation did not lead to a revolt, they argued that the regime dominated by the bureaucratic party is based on the substitution of the party for the working class, whose result is the creation of a new type of dominant class whose position and power cannot be explained by the traditional Marxist opposition between economic society and a political state that controls all private juridical property relations. A revolution against bureaucratic domination would have to do more than eliminate the political rulers of the moment; it would have to inaugurate a social transformation that overcomes the relations of domination that reproduce the deeper division between the dirigeants (the Stalinist party bureaucrats) who give orders and the exécutants (the working class) whose passivity destroys the capacity for initiative that would make them potential agents of a radical revolution. The theoretical implications of this interpretation of the possibility of revolution in the Soviet Union led Lefort and Castoriadis to question implicitly some fundamental assumptions of Marxism. In particular, they challenged the orthodox claim that the 1917 revolution brought about the ‘socialization’ of the means of production which could now function as the material basis for the construction of a new socialist regime. This led them to begin to develop the idea of a new type of social division in which political activity cannot be separated from the reproduction of society itself. This was their first step toward the idea of totalitarianism. For Lefort, as an active member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, some of the implications of this political analysis coincided with his philosophical development, as will be seen shortly. ¹⁰

The immediate challenge for the critical Marxist radicals was to understand the conditions that permitted the emergence of an unprecedented political domination by the Bolshevik bureaucracy after the 1917 revolution had overcome capitalist exploitation. ¹¹ Given Trotsky’s role in that revolution it is not surprising that, despite his opposition to Stalinism and to Stalin himself, Trotsky was blind to the material basis of the cascading descent through which the Bolshevik party had become both the principal agent and beneficiary of the new form of social division. As Lefort demonstrates, the party’s actions were explicable sometimes as the result of its recognition of the imperatives of retaining political control over a modernizing society while at other moments its choices were based on the social constraints imposed by imperatives of economic production, which had become increasingly complex as the Soviet Union industrialized and tried to satisfy the material needs of society. The consequences emerged, slowly and ever more painfully.

After the defeat of its external enemies in the years following the seizure of power, it was necessary to secure the domestic bases of society. In 1922, under Lenin’s (and Trotsky’s) leadership, social stability was sought by a ‘New Economic Policy’ (the NEP) that appealed to the principles of a free market and even to capitalist incentives, for example when state-run productive enterprises were supposed to operate on ‘a profit basis’. On the other hand, the state had to impose political measures to insure centralized control over the social relations of production. The result was a contradiction between the emerging modern industrial relations that demand autonomous decision-making and the political Plan imposed on society by the ruling party. During the years following Lenin’s death in 1924 the aspirants to leadership of the party faced a dilemma. To retain its autonomy as a political actor, the party had to adapt to socio-economic realities, even though its stated goal was their overcoming in a classless society. To master these economic constraints, the party abandoned its professed materialism in favor of an idealistic voluntarism that treated the difficulties it faced as political. The result was an increasingly apparent gap between the imaginary results proclaimed by the Five-Year Plan and the lived experience of the population.

The elimination of both the right and the left opposition (c.1933) and the complete domination of Stalin marked the moment when it was apparent that the processes set in motion by the revolution had swept from power both the former masters of production and the ephemeral self-rule of the proletariat itself. The Bolshevik party had become a new kind of dominant class, a political bureaucracy whose self-contradictory claim to legitimacy was at once idealist (pretending to seek a new society) and materialist (protecting and projecting its own power). The seeds of totalitarianism can be found in this paradoxical prehistory of the rise to power of Stalinism. The total politicization of all socio-economic relations in effect eliminates the autonomy of the political, which now can only react to external conditions. In this way, actual existing totalitarian politics is paradoxically anti-political: it denies its own political nature and its responsibility for choosing by appealing to the material necessities that call it to action. As a result, because bureaucracy was all-pervasive, Soviet society had no need for political rule (or its self-justification). Was this historical synthesis too powerful? Did it leave any place for critical thought, or revolution? Political events imposed the need for a new stage of analysis, as would other political events, including those of May 1968. Such ‘events’ denote a break with historical continuity whose cause cannot be explained, nor their effects predetermined.

Lefort returned to the analysis of the place the communist bureaucracy came to occupy by employing a phrase that Merleau-Ponty had used to describe philosophy: it is partout et nulle part, everywhere and nowhere. ¹² The philosopher had been describing the place of philosophy whose history he called an ‘enigma’ and whose stability is without foundation. Lefort seems to have recalled his teacher’s question at the time of the November 1956 Hungarian revolution which ripped apart the illusory permanence and stability of totalitarian domination. Lefort drew together the strands of the enigmatic figure that conceals the origin of totalitarianism in his essay ‘Totalitarianism without Stalin’. ¹³ Dead since 1953, Stalin had been denounced as a dictator at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Party three years later in February 1956; in June, Polish workers’ revolts forced the party to accept the return of the ‘revisionist’ Gomulka, whose ‘deviations’ had been condemned during Stalin’s time; in late October, Hungarian workers and intellectuals fought, arms in hand, an invading Soviet army for 12 days (Heym, 1974). This unexpected concatenation of events triggered two distinct but interrelated challenges to the Marxist project that had been present but were never explicit in Lefort’s activism over the past decade. Philosophically, the idea of revolution as a historical rupture between the past and a future in which the truth of history is revealed no longer appeared a desirable goal, or even a real possibility. Politically, the spontaneity of the workers’ revolts showed that even totalitarian society is not composed of inert, lifeless matter that needs to be organized and led by external actors who purportedly know how to reach out for a promised future. If society appears politically inert, this passivity may be the result of its unreasonable blind faith in such leaders – or of what Lefort would later call ‘self-willed servitude’.

The twin challenges to the Marxist premises of its political engagement led to a split within Socialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort and his comrades rejected the need for a vanguard party to lead the revolution, but they also refused to abandon the idea of revolution, continuing actively to encourage forms of autonomy among the working classes. After two years, they had to admit that their attempts to encourage forms of self-management had met with failure. Although he ceased to consider himself a political activist in 1958, Lefort did not abandon his desire for an anti-capitalist revolution. Following the unexpected death of Merleau-Ponty, Lefort took responsibility for the edition of the publication of the incomplete manuscript of Le visible et l’invisible (Merleau-Ponty, 1964), as well as the earlier La prose du monde (Merleau-Ponty, 1969). His own major publication during this period was the 1963 essay ‘La politique et la pensée de la politique’ (Lefort, 1978a: 45–104). In this lengthy set of reflections, Lefort brought together the results of the critique of totalitarianism and his continued attention to the possibility of political action. Ultimately, he argued here, the illusory hopes of the radical left awakened by the Algerian struggle had been dashed (not only by the French acquiescence to independence but by the internal struggles within the leadership of the Algerian revolt itself); the new revolutionary subject that could take the place of the proletariat failed to appear in the non-capitalist world.

The publication of the 700+ pages of Lefort’s doctoral dissertation, Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel (Lefort, 1971), that he had begun with Merleau-Ponty and completed under Raymond Aron, marked a new stage. He assumed his first teaching post in the new sociology department of the University of Caen where he began to elaborate the bases of what I am calling his ‘second critique’ of totalitarianism. ¹⁴ Prior to this point, his general understanding of totalitarianism had been that it was a totalizing systemic organization that paradoxically leaves no political space from which its own project can be conceived, interpreted, or criticized. Whether formulated as a materialism or reformulated in the categories of idealism, there was no way to understand the path to praxis. Lefort saw that this philosophical dilemma was structurally analogous to the consciousness of a political revolutionary seeking to escape the limits of both individual subjectivity and of the chains of objective necessity. At the same time, significantly, the dilemma persistently warned against an illusory unification of the two poles, as it appeared in the imaginary idea of the proletariat as both subject and object, producer and produced, passive and active, the incarnation of a body that claims to stand as the head of the revolutionary future. ¹⁵ The philosophical problem with this imaginary figure of the subject of revolutionary praxis is that such an ideal unity leaves no time or space free for reflection and self-reflection; it is for this reason unable to explain itself as free because it is embedded in the inertia of a society, as a material agent rather than a free subject capable of autonomous initiative. The result is a social paralysis that could only be escaped by the introduction of an outside agent – the party – that breaks the imaginary spell of unity and makes political action possible. In effect, while the unitary structure was critical (of ideological illusions) it was not self-critical. As a result, criticism of capitalist alienation and exploitation was abstractly moral; it left no room for autonomous political judgement.

Lefort picks up the thread of this argument in the concluding lines of his essay of 1963 (Lefort, 1978a: 104) that insists on the political need to rethink ‘la pensée de la politique’. Despite his growing criticism of Marxism-Leninism, Lefort’s second critique of totalitarianism begins from this point by affirming that the critical Marxist inspiration of the first critique had not been in vain. A long citation conveys the spirit of his transition more concisely than any commentary:

The idea of a theory that accepts the absence of determination and of a politics dedicated to conflict is not foreign to the spirit of Marxism. It is Marx who taught us to recognize that the creation of modern society is characterized by the collapse of traditional communities, the destruction of traditional modes of production and communication, of rules, models and ideologies that had assured men that they had a definite place in society and in nature. We see in Marx’s image of the proletariat the symbol of a real rupture of social unity, and, in the very movement of history, we see a question of the relation of man to Being. If those two intuitions have been hidden by the myth of a universal class and of a human community this encompasses the limits of the globe, that is perhaps because he was more indebted than Marx thought to the rationalism of western political philosophy. (Lefort, 1978a: 104)

The concluding sentence to this paragraph makes clear the need for a transition from the primacy of ‘la politique’ to ‘la pensée de la politique’. Lefort suggests laconically that ‘if we now doubt his [Marx’s] radicalism, it is perhaps because he was, in spite of appearances, the ultimate expression of a tradition in which modern thought can no longer recognize itself’. One can speculate whether the editor of the unpublished manuscripts of Merleau-Ponty was thinking here of the Heideggerian tonalities of The Visible and the Invisible, or whether the idea of Marx as ‘the ultimate expression of a tradition’ referred to Marx’s Hegelian heritage, as Merleau-Ponty had argued in a posthumous manuscript titled ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel’ that Lefort later edited for publication in Textures while he was elaborating his second critique of totalitarianism. ¹⁶ Rather than debate these undecidable philological, it is better to turn to the new philosophical issues, direction emerging in Lefort’s thought.

II Interlude: From Marx to Machiavelli

Facing the difficulties that resulted from his first critique of the (anti-)political logic of totalitarianism, Lefort recognized the vanity of the revolutionary project of transcending social divisions by putting an end to the history of class conflict and reconciling what Marx had called the political superstructure with the economic basis of society. He turned to his interpretation of the figure of Machiavelli as interpreter of the earliest experiences of modern politics. Lefort distinguished three distinct critical and self-critical currents that at once flowed together in the work of the Florentine while retaining their own specific form in the new historical epoque of modernity. The first of these articulates the forms of Power that must exist in order for a society to exist and to understand itself as a society. The modes of existence of Power in the modern epoch are distinct from those that were available to the classical contemplative life of leisure; their basis is the vita activa, as illustrated by the historical figure of the modern Prince, uncertain of his status and for just that reason both threatening and threatened. The second current is established by the forms of Law that regulate mutual relations among citizens within a polity; the uniqueness of modern legal forms depends on the need to legitimate laws that are based on republican self-government rather than appeal to the status of the classical lawgiver (be that ruler theological or secular). The third element is formed by the new types of Knowledge generated by critical dialogue among peers who can no longer appeal to eternal truths that are recognized as objective and universal; rather than rely on such static a priori ontological truth the moderns are concerned with shared meaning (sens) that emerges within the finitude, temporal fluctuation, and global transformations of new worlds. Although this triad of Power, Law and Knowledge appears frequently in contemporary French theories, Lefort’s usage is distinct, as I will try briefly to illustrate.

The confluence of these three currents in modernity does not unite them in one unique figure similar to the World Spirit or the Philosopher-King; their modern figure recognizes a pluralism articulated in configurations that are open to change. Lefort’s later philosophical critique of totalitarianism will be seen to formulate this rejection of the imaginary idea of the possibility of incarnating the unity of Power, Law, and Knowledge, as will be seen. In the case of Machiavelli, Lefort shows how the exiled Florentine repeatedly analyzed modernity as a contested space whose lack of a unique center or any determinate circumference opens an originary space for a mode of social relations that Lefort began to define as le politique, the apparently substantive representation of what aspects of experience a society counts as political. His point was not that Machiavelli offered lessons for the modern democratic practice of la politique, the space of everyday interest-politics; his argument was that le politique both defines and depends on a specifically modern form of social relations that makes possible democracy.

The potentially democratic implications of Machiavelli’s analysis acquire their dynamic aspect in his interpretation of the role of conflict in Livy’s Discourses. Reflecting from his rural exile on Livy’s History of Rome, Machiavelli underlined the multiple ways that oppression and domination by the powerful had been checked and countered by the popular desire for freedom. Lefort interprets these conflicts as figurations of what he calls an ‘originary division of the social’ whose origin is the opposition of the desire of the Great to command and the refusal of the People (sometimes called the ‘plebes’) to submit to what is illegitimate because it is arbitrary. As originary, this conflict has the structure of a specific dialectic characterized by the absence of any teleology. The outcome of the conflict is neither a one-sided victory nor an imaginary synthesis but a persistent mobile antinomy; the struggle neither breaks the popular will nor eliminates the needs of the plebes, whose refusal to yield or to disappear is constitutive of political freedom. In this way, the exercise of freedom is not a zero-sum conflict; it creates and renews a dynamic that encourages the growth of both the desire for domination and the assertion of liberty.

Lefort enriched this basic perspective in a later analysis of J.G.A. Pocock’s (1975) concept of a ‘Machiavellian moment’ which stresses the symbolic structures that made possible both the historical genesis and the ‘originary conflict’ in early English democracy, for example among the radical Whigs. ¹⁷ He came to describe the positive role of this originary social conflict as expressed in and by the invention of yet unimagined figures of Power-Law-Knowledge that came to replace arbitrary rule by private power with forms of public regulation. In a series of analyses that may appear to be (but cannot be reduced to) a political adaptation of the Marxist vision of a history of class struggle, he stresses the ways that social conflict revivifies formal juridical institutions whose routinization had desiccated the normative values essential to the life of a republic. Although Lefort never reflected on the unity and coherence of his own work, ¹⁸ it is useful to identify the idea of an ‘originary conflict’ with the concept of a ‘Machiavellian moment’ that can occur when the routinization of conflicts of everyday politics is replaced unexpectedly by ‘events’ whose uncanny foundation cannot be understood in everyday terms but demand philosophical reflection insofar as they belong to the domain that Lefort calls ‘the political’. This is the moment at which the idea of an ‘invention of democracy’ becomes fundamental. Its task is not to propose institutional reforms in order to routinize the uncanniness revealed by the event. Although he appears to have traded Marx for Machiavelli, my reconstruction of Lefort’s first critique showed that even while working within the Marxist political framework, he never abandoned the primacy of the political which was brought explicitly to the foreground of his second critique of totalitarianism, where the historical dynamic of democracy replaces the antinomic logic of capitalist progress. Despite surface difference, has Lefort landed so far from his Marxist origins?

III The Critique of Totalitarianism as an ‘invention démocratique’

The most pregnant expression of what I have been referring to as Lefort’s second critique of totalitarianism is found in his essay ‘Droits de l’homme et politique’. The text was published in 1980 in the new journal Libre, whose editorial committee included both Lefort and Castoriadis, who had been brought together again at the beginning of the new decade in a changed political climate that had seen the union of the left on the threshold of power in France, posing the question of revolution and its avatars more acutely. The inglorious end of the American war in Vietnam had discredited liberalism while Mao’s cultural revolution (and Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia) had disgraced the communal vision of radical revolution that could overcome liberal individualism. Ideological confusion gave rise to strange bedfellows as former leftists inscribed liberalism and human rights on their crusading banners, forgetting the socio-economic exploitation these self-satisfied new radicals unthinkingly ignored. The nascent French liberal left, baptized as ‘New Philosophers’ by the Parisian press, had in effect thrown out the Marxist baby with the totalitarian bathwater and now found itself without ideological foundations. That missing certainty was on offer from the other side of the Atlantic, where Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. Not everyone was deceived by its offer.

In this new context, the title of Lefort’s essay could lead to misunderstanding. His claim was not that human rights could or should be the basis for specific political choices; his essay questions the relation of the then widely advertised concept of human rights to what Lefort had begun to call ‘the political’. Once again rereading Marx, Lefort pointed out that the young Marx’s 1843 essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, which seemed to most commentators to mark his transition away from political idealism to a materialist theory, avoided the question posed by its title. Marx’s interpretation of the concept of human rights as the expression of the material interest of a new bourgeoisie deprives the idea of rights of human depth, just as characterizing its interests as ‘Jewish’ avoids reflections on the historical implications of the unexpected emergence of ‘the Jewish question’ as a political factor in the century after the French revolution. As a result, argues Lefort, Marx’s materialism blinds him to both history and to politics because he was unable to recognize the symbolic horizon opened in 1789 by the idea that humans have rights that must be affirmed (and can also be enlarged) by new forms of political struggle. Rights do not only exist as static statutory laws or even as constitutional principles; newly imagined rights can be invented in democratic struggles. ¹⁹

Lefort’s contention is not that Marx’s critique of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man was empirically false; he criticizes the failure to appreciate the symbolic status of the rights claimed by the declaration. For that reason, Marx ignored the distinction between a liberal-moral (and ultimately anti-political) interpretation of human rights and the political-historical interpretation that opens the question of the political regime that defines the conditions essential to a dynamic democracy. The fact that rights are only symbolic does not mean that they are simply a token concession by the powers-that-be. His reading criticizes both a one-sided materialism and an abstract moralism, each of which neglects the political potential of the symbolic dimension. Really existing human rights as they have taken root come to exist in liberal societies fail to recognize that modern declarations of rights are based on the idea that humans as such have rights and that their compass can be enlarged. There is an interplay between the symbolic assertion – which some would call philosophical or moral, perhaps even utopian – that humans have rights and the actual political rights as they come to exist in a given historical moment. This creative potential of the assertion of rights may become a destructive dynamic in anti-democratic or totalitarian regimes, as Lefort suggests by his choice of the title for the volume in which his essay was published: L’invention démocratique (Lefort, 1981), which is subtitled ‘les limites de la domination totalitaritaire’. Lefort’s chosen title for this volume makes clear that he has left behind the Marxist materialism that was central to his first critique of totalitarianism.

Although the concept of the symbolic becomes increasingly important in Lefort’s later work, he never defines it explicitly but concentrates on it effects. ²⁰ The moral liberalism of the New Philosophers and their criticism of totalitarianism was often vivid and material, but the universality they attribute to ‘man’ is no substitute for an analysis of the political regime of Soviet totalitarianism. Lefort took up his pen again when Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago appeared in French. Identifying the work as ‘a book that a small number of us had long awaited’, Lefort titled his essay Un homme en trop (Lefort, 1976), stressing that the prisoner in the Soviet Arctic prisons was an ‘excess man’ who was less than the human being whose rights were declared by the early bourgeois revolutions. This title also underlines the fact that Solzhenitsyn was deliberately identifying with the experience of the imprisoned Zek (inmate of a forced labor camp), which he knew from personal experience, while maintaining that this singular voice claimed to speak in a voice that was universal. That is why Lefort claimed that this work, which he described as a ‘literary investigation’, could speak in a voice that was recognized by ‘the small number’ of anti-totalitarian leftists who had ‘waited for it’. As will be seen, the object of Solzhenitsyn’s investigation was the symbolic structures of society which are specific empirical incarnations of symbolic structures whose universality is not exhausted in their singularity.

Two examples can serve to illustrate briefly the effects of this symbolic focus on Lefort’s renewed critique of Soviet totalitarianism. At the summit of this system stands the figure of the ‘egocrat’ surrounded by the ‘mini-egocrat’ of the party apparatus who constitutes his organic body. The image alludes clearly to Stalin, and more generally to the Bolshevik leader and the disciplined cogs that move the party machinery. This analysis goes beyond the materialism of Lefort’s 1956 essay on ‘Stalinism without Stalin’, which was directed at the self-contradictory role of the vanguard revolutionary party. The occupant of the summit is now seen as fulfilling the need to incarnate the legitimation of communist rule whose symbolic function is now seen as unifying in one figure the foundations of Power, Law, and Knowledge. The claim to incorporate these symbolic constituents of modern society as a single reality fatally condemns the claim to be the egocrat, destroying at the same time that it apparently justifies his place. As in Marx’s critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the realization of the symbolic fatally condemns the egocrat, destroying its creative potential while compressing its constituent horizon. The limitless claims of the egocrat become a parody; the exaggerations of the cult of a leader who has to pretend to be both infallible and omnipotent are met first by ridicule and ultimately by indifference. That is how the Zek sees it through sober eyes purged of illusion by the inhuman horrors of the Gulag; it is also, Lefort’s argument implies, the way contemporary dissidents continue to see their situation, and its possibilities, however desperate their situation appears to conformist realists. ²¹

The experience of the prisoner in the Gulag represents the other pole of the picture drawn by Solzhenitsyn’s literary creation. The Zek, who according to totalitarian legal statutes has not been condemned for a specific act, is in effect an ‘excess man’, an outcast, useless human refuse whose experience in the camps expresses the singularity of a totalitarian world that has neither figure nor features; it is anomic, asocial and, ultimately, anti-political. However, unlike the egocrat, the Zek is also a human being, a person even though he is denied a place in the world of other persons. ²² Lefort insists that the apparent similarity of his situation to that of the Marxist proletariat as a ‘nothing that can become everything’ is illusory; the Zek does not incarnate a positive concrete post-totalitarian future. Why, then, did Lefort insist on the political importance of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago for ‘us’?

The apparently straightforward question that Lefort invited with his question ‘why were we waiting for this book?’ opens a further dimension of this second, symbolic critique of totalitarianism. ‘How’, Lefort asks, ‘could fear of the truth [about the Soviet camps] have been so stubbornly maintained in France [. . .] by those who considered themselves leftists, and who nonetheless knew what they didn’t want to admit to knowing?’ Lefort points out that his question had been asked centuries earlier and had been repeated critically since then; it is political as well as philosophical. ‘When I ask this question’, explains Lefort, ‘I am thinking of how to understand the old enigma described by La Boétie: What are the roots of voluntary servitude when the despot who was supposed to incarnate knowledge and power no longer exists, and when his [contemporary] substitute, the Party, is no longer venerated?’ ²³ The totalitarianism that replaces that despot is described by La Boétie in the 16th century, whose symbolic status guaranteed what Lefort follows La Boétie in describing as a type of ‘voluntary servitude’ that is ‘enforced’ by the appeal of an imaginaire that emerges from a concomitant search for the unity and embodiment that had formerly existed in the pre-modern theological-political royal despotism. A similar but modern symbolic structure is embodied in the imaginaire embodied by what Lefort and Solzhenitsyn call the ‘egocrat’ whose reality is inscribed in the ‘organs’ of the Party and its bureaucracy composed of ‘mini-egocrats’. The realization of this imaginaire destroys the autonomous symbolic structure of the political that is essential to modern democracy; it also represents the realization of what I call totalitarian anti-politics, which is characterized by a ‘voluntary servitude’ that is political insofar as it is the expression of a will that is free but it is anti-political in its consequences.

Lefort’s interpretation of the anti-political imaginaire articulated in Solzhenitsyn’s ‘literary investigation’ is reflected in his several re-readings of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to which I can only allude in the present context. He stresses a series of ‘inversions’ or ‘reversals’ whose unpredictability opens democratic regimes to what I call a totalitarian temptation whose basis is an imaginary search for the incorporation of unity in a stabile body unmoved by the changing whims of liberty or the fluctuating figures of equality. The inversions and reversals take place when one or the other of the symbolic principles of equality and liberty seeks its realization. For example, as real, liberty threatens to dissolve equality but, on the other hand, realized equality leaves no space for the manifestation of liberty. Each of these familiar figures is based on the replacement of the symbolic foundation of the political by an imaginary quest for the impossible anti-political incarnation of the unity of the sovereign people, whose realization would always be either greater or less than its imaginary representation. The imaginary project of social unity is the antithesis of the regime of modern democracy in which – as opposed to the premodern theological-political imaginaire – the place of power must always remain empty. This basic insight, to which Lefort recurs consistently, has become almost a meme for those who invoke his authority; yet what characterizes this empty place of power is undefined. While he sometimes invokes the idea of a ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ democracy, Lefort is not an anarchist; he never claims that modern democracy could be ‘realized’ once-and-for-all; that type of anti-political theory is left to the servants of totalitarian despotisms. Lefort’s argument is more phenomenological, illustrating the never-ending interplay between the symbolic structure of democracy and the imaginary desire to incarnate real or realized democracy.

The consistency of Lefort’s political thinking reappears in his last book, La complication (1999), whose title is far from an admission of defeat. Provoked by the ‘ideological’ post-Soviet necrologies of totalitarianism published in the 1990s by Martin Malia and François Furet, Lefort reached back to what I have called here his ‘first’, more Marxist-materialist critique to point out that both historians focus their interpretations on the imaginary dimension of totalitarianism. He shows that, paradoxically, the stress that each of them places on the supposedly real effects of Soviet or Marxist ‘ideology’ blinds them to the other potentials opened by its symbolic structure. Lefort does not dispute their historical presentations as such; as with Solzhenitsyn’s Goulag Archipelago, his criticism can be interpreted as ultimately directed at ‘us’, more precisely: at our search for an imaginary logic that could make sense of the uncertain history whose advent we welcomed after the fall of communism. Like ‘us’, Lefort is suggesting, Malia and Furet wanted their work to be understood as an engagement in their times. Like Marx facing the contradiction between the ideals of the revolutionaries and the reality of the times, each seemed to imagine that he stood at the end of a historical moment (or epoch) that offered a general standpoint from which to judge (and denounce, and then to convict) the choices of past actors. This dismissive historical positivism has a different foundation than Lefort’s own political judgements, which are based on a wager that he accepts en connaissance de cause. Consistent with his understanding of democracy, Lefort appeals neither to historical certainties nor to a priori moral universals. For him, there will be no ‘lutte finale’, nor can we yearn for an ‘Internationale’ that overcomes social division and, as its anthem promises, realizes the ‘genre humain’.

IV A Practical Illustration of the Political Importance of the Symbolic Dimension

The editors of this journal are not the only ones who have asked why I insist that an understanding of totalitarianism is more than a historical curiosity or a political puzzle. They and others have also asked why Lefort’s philosophical and political thought is not as well known outside of France as many of his French contemporaries. Political disagreements do not by themselves explain philosophical differences; but political experience is not without influence on the recognition of problems in need of further elucidation. These concluding pages hint at some personal experiences that directed my attention over the past decades to the kinds of issues that are clarified by the paths that led to Lefort’s theory of the invention of democracy as well as the difficulties of preserving its virtues.

At the time that I became involved in leftist politics – by which I mean the civil rights movement in the early 1960s and, a bit later, opposition to the American war in Vietnam – Marxism was not taught in the philosophy department, although the first translations of Marx’s early philosophical writings had begun to appear. When I received a teaching fellowship during my first year of graduate studies at the University of Texas, I had to sign a statement swearing that I was not (and had not ever been!) a member of a long list of organizations that had been, justly or not, identified as ‘communist’. Not surprisingly, I wanted to find out more about this forbidden fruit which, I learned, was more available in France. I was also drawn to another relatively rare nourishment in philosophy departments then, phenomenology, which had yet to find soil and nourishment among the stone-and-rock filled lands of analytic philosophy. Once again, I looked to France. Thanks to the support of Paul Ricoeur, I received a Fulbright Fellowship which took me to Paris in the summer of 1966. When I returned to Texas two years later with a draft of a doctoral thesis – on Marx’s passage from philosophy to political economy – there was still no one with the knowledge to direct my work (or to criticize it, for that matter). While the political climate on my return had improved on the civil rights front, Vietnam was a gaping political wound that had a radicalizing effect on the young opposition movement which was more interested in material than in philosophical radicalism, preferring Lenin (or Mao) to Marx. I understood, but I also brought back from Paris the firsthand experience of the May 1968 movement on the campus at Nanterre and in the mass demonstrations that shook the society.

During the next decade, I was concerned to integrate and to enrich these first experiences. At first, the challenge was to deepen my understanding of Marx as a philosopher, a social theorist, a political economist as well as a revolutionary. While the first three projects were relatively straightforward, my understanding of revolution was preformatted by the well-known (at least in France) sequence that led from 1789 to 1791 before radicalizing in the Jacobin Terror of 1793 to the point that the ‘Thermidorian Reaction’ seemed inevitable. The other model of revolution, the Russian of 1917, also led by a minority in the name of the voiceless, had suffered its own Terror but had, perhaps, stopped at the edge of a precipice; but revisionism took hold, as did the Cold War. The revolutionary who had been able to avoid the Jacobin-Bolshevist fate seemed to be Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German internationalist theorist and militant who had taken part in the aborted 1905 revolution in Russia, stood almost alone among her German comrades in opposing nationalist participation in the First World War, and opposed Lenin’s Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917, before being assassinated in the failed Spartakus revolution in Germany in 1918. My first publication was, naturally, to edit and publish a translated edition of Luxemburg’s Selected Political Writings (1971).

Rosa Luxemburg’s political theory was denounced during her lifetime as ‘spontaneist’, or simply anarchist; and while it remained out of favor among the orthodox, her theoretical practice and her person appealed to the 1968er that had returned from Paris. But when I returned to her writings a few years later for an international conference in Italy, to my surprise I found that when she was pressed to justify her interpretations, she ultimately fell back on the authority of Marx! Her spontaneity of judgment was built on a confidence held dogmatically and produced by the imaginaire of Marxism. As I continued my explorations of Marx and Marxism, I studied other critical thinkers who situated themselves more-or-less dogmatically within the framework that I called, in a book in which I published these individual chapters, The Marxian Legacy (Howard, 1977). I didn’t realize then that my title was a play on the symbolic dimension of Marxism; that only became clear while preparing the third edition (Howard, 2020). Marx had left his future followers both a real heritage from which to nourish themselves and also promised a future that they and their actions were obliged to realize. The confusion of what had been really said and done by Marx with a future glimpsed through a barely opened door was a recipe for failure. Marx himself recognized the danger in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which begins with the clear affirmation that ‘men make their own history’, but warns immediately that they make it ‘under conditions’, including ‘the tradition of the past’, which ‘weigh like a nightmare’ that distorts the clear daytime imperative to make our own history. While Kafka made the same point in his parable, ‘Before the Law’, I found it again and again in the work of the Marx-inspired Frankfurt School of critical theory that I came to know during later studies in Germany.

I encountered the most important practical and theoretical aspect of this legacy of Marxism in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. Their early writing in their journal Socialisme ou Barbarie – which appealed to me from the outset because the option underlined by the title was a favorite slogan of Rosa Luxemburg – was a wholesome shock. I have talked in the preceding pages about Lefort’s contribution, as well as his further development of the symbolic dimension. Castoriadis’ contributions, and particularly his practice as a psychoanalyst, would merit a distinct essay, as would a systematic comparison of their later work (particularly because they worked together at several points, including their involvement in publication of new journals). The most important lesson of their work for me has been the need to rethink the model of revolution, which cannot be based on any of the variants of French history. This recognition, which took a while to sink in, led me back to the American revolution, having grown up in the United States, and particularly to the anti-communist ambience of the Cold War (Howard, 2004). This is not the place to recapitulate my re-interpretations of American history since my change of perspective. In the present context, two examples will suffice to clarify the role of the symbolic in the interpretation of political history as Claude Lefort interprets it.

The comparison of the two models of modern democratic revolution of course recalls Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, whose first edition dates from 1963. I read the book at first in my early quest to understand the idea and the real possibility of revolutionary action, but I only began to understood the philosophical weight of Arendt’s thesis slowly, mainly through conversations over the years, also with Lefort. ²⁴ Although he published only three essays explicitly dialoguing with her work, Lefort’s contributions well merited the awaard of the ‘Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought’ that he received in 1998 from an international committee (of which I was a member). As it happens, I was asked to deliver the Laudatio when the prize was presented to him at the magnificent City Hall of Bremen. Because Lefort had not been translated into German, it was necessary for the speech to, rhetorically at least, draw the attention of a new public (Howard, 1999). I suggested three points of divergence that could be responsible for the different national reception: Germany’s political past and its mostly successful efforts to ensure that fascism will not return makes Germans reluctant to deepening or broadening the concept of totalitarianism; further, Germans’ desire to overcome the division between its two national entities, as well as the powerful Social Democratic party’s economic wooing of the communist regime, reinforced the same effect; and finally, what counts as German political theory tends to be overly sociological, most recently in the system-theories of Niklas Luhmann. I might have added that the classical style of academic political theory in Germany has tended to be politically conservative and that the Frankfurt style of critical theory was more sociological than political.

A few years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, another a new encounter with the culture of (East German) totalitarianism in 1992 forced me to recognize the political meaning underlying my largely historical political interpretation of the foundations of American democracy. Speaking extemporaneously, in German, in a lecture on the ‘Origins of American Democracy’ at the University of Greifswald in the former GDR, I described the American political experience as culminating in the creation of a ‘democratic republic’. The faces of the students made clear that this possibility did not appeal to them although I meant the concept positively. When I analyzed this experience later with a colleague, it became obvious that the students’ generation had only recently left behind a German ‘democratic republic’ which represented an experience they had no desire to renew. This led me to reflect on the practical effects of an important symbolic difference between a ‘democratic republic’ and a ‘republican democracy’. Put simply, the ‘democratic republic’ seeks to identify the people (the demos) with the state in a unity whose basis is the imaginary realization of the identity of the two elements, lending real content to the empty symbolic institutional forms. This is the basis of what I began to define as the ‘totalitarian temptation’. The symbolic weight of what I now call ‘republican democracy’ is placed on the difference between the unitary republic (the formal constitution) and the pluralism guaranteed by the separation of powers. In this way, the republican democracy pertains not only to the institutions of government but also the social pluralism that makes possible what Lefort called ‘the invention of democracy’. ²⁵

The difference between these two forms of the political is not merely semantic; it reflects both the place of anti-politics and its relation to the contemporary question of totalitarianism, as well as the challenge of imposing limits on anti-politics through the inventiveness of democracy. Returning to my introductory remarks concerning the forms of comparative analysis of contemporary illiberal democracy, the practical implications of my reconstruction of the role of the symbolic dimension in Lefort’s later work are experienced in political action that points toward the invention of the rights that make possible the creation of a republican democracy. But the political translation of that experience is accompanied by the shadow of a ‘democratic republic’ which could open the door to an anti-political politics. ²⁶ The threshold that is crossed when the door is held open too widely cannot be defined by the sort of normative theory sought by comparative politics; it can only be described by experience and recognized in action. ²⁷