Claude Lefort

Claude Lefort (; ; 21 April 1924 – 3 October 2010) was a French philosopher and activist.

He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose posthumous publications Lefort later edited). By 1943 he was organising a faction of the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris.

Lefort was impressed by Cornelius Castoriadis when he first met him. From 1946 he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu–Montal Tendency, so called from their pseudonyms ''Pierre Chaulieu'' (Castoriadis) and ''Claude Montal'' (Lefort). They published ''On the Regime and Against the Defence of the USSR'', a critique of both the Soviet Union and its Trotskyist supporters. 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-organisation.

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 "organisationalist" tendencies. In 1958 he, Henri Simon and others left Socialisme ou Barbarie and formed the group Informations et Liaison Ouvrières (Workers' Information and Liaison).

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 (EHESS), being affiliated to the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. He has written on the early political writers Niccolò Machiavelli and Étienne de La Boétie and explored "the Totalitarian enterprise" in its "denial of social division... [and] of the difference between the order of power, the order of law and the order of knowledge". Provided by Wikipedia
Showing 1 - 18 results of 18 for search 'Lefort, Claude', query time: 0.03s Refine Results
  1. 1

    La invención democrática / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 1990
    Book
  2. 2

    Negarse a pensar el totalitarismo / by Lefort, Claude

    Article
  3. 3

    ¿Qué es la burocracia? y otros ensayos / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 1970
    Book
  4. 4

    La invención democrática / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 1990
    Book
  5. 5

    Le travail de l'oeuvre Machiavel / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 1986
    Book
  6. 6

    A invenoao democrática : Os limites da dominaçao totalitária / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 1983
    Book
  7. 7

    El pueblo y el poder / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 2014
    Book
  8. 8

    Democracia y representación / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 2011
    Book
  9. 9
  10. 10

    El pueblo y el poder / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 2014
    Book
  11. 11

    El arte de escribir y lo político / by Lefort, Claude

    Published 2007
    Book
  12. 12

    La incertidumbre democrática : ensayos sobre lo político / by Lefort, Claude, 1924-2010

    Published 2004
    Book
  13. 13

    La invención democrática / by Lefort, Claude, 1924-2010

    Published 1990
    Book
  14. 14

    ¿Qué es la burocracia? / by Lefort, Claude, 1924-2010

    Published 1977
    Book
  15. 15

    La Boétie y la cuestión de lo político / by Clastres, Pierre

    Published 1890
    Other Authors: “…Lefort, Claude…”
    Book
  16. 16

    La institución. La pasividad : notas de cursos en el College de France (1954-1955) / by Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961

    Published 2012
    Other Authors: “…Lefort, Claude, 1924-2010…”
    Book
  17. 17

    Voces de la filosofía francesa contemporánea /

    Published 2005
    Other Authors:
    Book
  18. 18

    Filosofia política, 1 /

    Published 1984
    Other Authors:
    Book