Theoria

Columbia University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, by noted French political theorist Claude Lefort (Cloth, 237 pp., $35.00)

Praise for Complications:

“The so-called triumph of capitalism that accompanied the real collapse of communism in 1989 has led Americans to ‘bury communism’—and forget it. But in Europe and especially France, the attempt to understand and explain both the ‘totalitarian temptation’ that drew so many around the world to communism’s ‘promise’ as well as the abrupt collapse of a system thought to be deeply entrenched has engendered vigorous debate. In Complications, Claude Lefort takes on his great compatriots Francois Furet and Martin Malia, arguing that Communism was not an ideology based on a seductive illusion or liberal myth (the Party will free you from the State), but a complex product of modernity itself. He does not wish to excuse Communism, but to complicate its meanings and, in the tradition of Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt, to show that its perniciousness was built into a European radical revolutionary project that began with the French Revolution and whose dangers should have been apparent from the outset. For those who think history is not over and that communism’s remarkable worldly successes and its abject collapse demand understanding, this book is indispensable. You need not agree with Lefort (I don’t) to appreciate the way in which he clarifies the central questions of Communism’s relationship to radical liberalism, on the one side, and totalitarianism, on the other.”
—Benjamin R. Barber, Distinguished Senior Fellow, DEMOS Kekst Professor, University of Maryland

“Claude Lefort is to French political philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century what Maurice Blanchot was to its literature: a hidden but decisive master. I belong to those who owe him a great debt in this regard. Lefort is first of all the most lucid and most penetrating analyst of totalitarianism, and Complications is a remarkable synthesis of his approach to the subject. But this heir of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was always and equally a great citizen, his lucidity never leading to either apathy or cynicism. The analysis of totalitarianism and the demand for a more active democracy have always been bound up indissolubly in his life and thought.”
—Pierre Rosanvallon, author of Democracy Past and Future

Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy ties together the central concerns of the work of Claude Lefort over the past half-century. A pivotal figure in French thought, Lefort studied under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, cofounded with Cornelius Castoriadis the influential journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, and famously engaged in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the Soviet Union and Communist parties in the West. He has influenced generations of political thinkers and throughout his career has offered invaluable leftist, non-communist critiques of both liberalism and Communism.

It is the prevailing belief that the death of communism was a victory for liberal democracy. In Complications, however, Lefort challenges this interpretation and provides new ways of understanding the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist phenomenon. He also maintains that those who regard the end of Communism as the triumph of markets and “freedom” restrict the scope of democratic thought and the possibility of greater social equality. In the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron, Lefort complicates the pieties of historical understanding and offers a new approach to thinking about totalitarianism and a more vital democracy.

Contents

Foreword by Dick Howard
Acknowledgments
Translator’s Introduction by Julian Bourg
Author’s Introduction
1. Wisdom of the Historian
2. Critique of “Couch Liberalism”
3. Autopsy of an Illusion
4. Marx’s False Paternity
5. The Idea of Revolution and the Revolutionary Phenomenon
6. The Jacobin Phantom
7. A Liberal Matrix for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat?
8. Democracy and Totalitarianism
9. The Myth of the Soviet Union in the West
10. The French Communist Party After World War II
11. Utopia and Tragedy
12. The Political and the Social
13. An Intentional Movement
14. The Party Above All
15. Disincorporation and Reincorporation of Power
16. Hannah Arendt on the Law of Movement and Ideology
17. The Perversion of the Law
18. The Fabrication of the Social
19. Voluntary Servitude
20. Impossible Reform
21. Planning and Social Division
22. Psychologism and Moralism at Fault
23. Communism and the Constitution of the World-Space
Notes
Index

About the Authors

Claude Lefort is the director of studies emeritus at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales. He is the author of Writing: The Political Test, Democracy and Political Theory, and Political Forms of Modern Society, among other works.

Julian Bourg is assistant professor of history at Bucknell University. He is the editor of After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France and the author of From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought.

Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Among his books are The Marxian Legacy (2nd ed.), The Birth of American Political Thought, From Marx to Kant (2nd ed.), and Political Judgments.

For more information, please visit the book’s Web page: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/978023113/9780231133005.HTM

(Review essay forthcoming as Columbia UP was kind enough to send me a review copy.)