Claude Lefort aura été l'un des analystes majeurs, avec Hannah Arendt, des totalitarismes du XXe siècle, tout en élaborant une des pensées les plus lucides sur la démocratie. Cet ouvrage réunit des essais-préfaces portant sur des grands textes (du XIIIe au XXe siècle) de la pensée politique occidentale. Constamment attentif au présent (et volontiers sur le ton mordant d'un polémiste), inlassable observateur de la vie politique française et internationale, il présente et redécouvre de grands classiques – Dante, Michelet, Quinet, Tocqueville – , mais propose aussi ses découvertes d'écrits nouveaux (comme le témoignage de déporté de Georges Petit ou l'essai de Cécile Vaissié sur le sort de la littérature en URSS). Lire, pour Lefort, fut toujours mettre radicalement en jeu sa propre pensée. Aujourd'hui, lire Lefort lecteur, c'est accéder au coeur d'une interrogation philosophico-politique parmi les plus puissantes de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. (4e de couv.)
Dans sa conférence Marc Bloch, Claude Lefort pense la société démocratique dans sa fragilité et sa fécondité, à l'aune de l'histoire occidentale et de l'actualité des années 2000. La fécondité démocratique est constituée par l'acceptation de la division sociale et la création d'un espace public : Claude Lefort reprend ici des thèmes qui lui sont chers à travers une réflexion sur le processus historique d'urbanisation. La fragilité démocratique, quant à elle, est pensée dans le contexte de la crise des banlieues en France : à ce niveau, c'est la corruption des mœurs démocratiques et les inégalités sociales qui indiquent une lésion du tissu social.
Claude Lefort's 'Dante's Modernity' presents a detailed and highly original interpretation of Dante's Monarchia. Lefort casts Dante as the first political thinker with a concept of humanity defined as the whole of the human race, the first to imagine a universal society in political terms, and the first to reveal the formative role of force, of wars and division in the advent of such a political unity. Tracing the career of Dante's innovations in the political thought and praxis of the succeeding centuries, Lefort then shows how what is 'new' in Dante cannot be separated from its later avatars — from the varied realizations, distortions, and misapplications it would inspire at later historical junctures. Any contemporary realization of the potential inherent in Dante's innovative idea of sovereignty would require the project of 'disentangling' the links between universalism, imperialism, and nationalism that have been instituted in its name. ; Claude Lefort, 'Dante's Modernity', in Claude Lefort, Dante's Modernity: An Introduction to the 'Monarchia'. With an Essay by Judith Revel , ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer, trans. by Jennifer Rushworth, Cultural Inquiry, 16 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 1–85
La gauche brésilienne a longtemps été dédaigneuse de la question des droits de l'homme jugée à l'aune des « droits formels » et de la « démocratie bourgeoise ». Comme le montre Luciano de Oliveira c'est durant la dictature militaire que la gauche va tout à la fois rompre avec le marxisme révolutionnaire et se doter d'une nouvelle culture politique prenant en compte la question du droit. La réflexion sur l'histoire de ces transformations conduit à s'interroger sur la façon dont la dictature reçut à ses débuts de nombreux appuis populaires, comment de larges secteurs légitimèrent les multiples violations des droits de l'homme à l'encontre des opposants. L'avènement d'un régime démocratique se traduisit par un souci nouveau de l'égalité entre les citoyens et partant suscita un regard nouveau sur l'usage de la torture et de la violence.
The cognitive worth of the concept of totalitarianism is constantly refuted. In this text, the author begins by confronting his perception of totalitarianism as a new social formation, which he advocated in many of his works, with four scientific arguments raised by historians against totalitarianism as a political category or in favour of a limited use thereof. The first is that communism and fascism are fundamentally different, that the ideologies which characterize them are radically opposed to one another. This argument overlooks the fact that in such regimes ideology is not merely the prevalent discourse -- it has a new function and efficiency, it establishes a totalitarian "regime" of language and thought in which the power of discourse and the discourse of power are made equal. The second argument is that totalitarianism is evident, in Germany and Russia, only during limited periods. To this the author replies that it is a "realistic" illusion to assume that the totalitarian project was ever fully realized in history. According to the third objection, the concept of totalitarianism is of no cognitive worth to the historian, and totalitarian regimes belong to the order of contingency, and not of historical necessity. On the other hand, the author stresses the historical novelty of totalitarianism, which does spring and can spring only from the modern "democratic revolution" (in Tocqueville's sense) as a radical refutation thereof. The final objection of a methodologically aware historian (F. Furet) is that the concept of totalitarianism can be analytically fruitful only if used as an "ideal type", as a common trait of regimes established in atomized societies through total domination by way of ideology and terror. To this the author replies that we cannot be satisfied with the use of the concept "ideal type", although it is true that it liberates the historian from the naivety of positivistic descriptive historiography. The making of an ideal type thus makes it possible to avoid the choice between philosophy and descriptive history, but only inasmuch as the historian is transformed into a cognizant subject which is external with regard to history. In the second part of the text, the author provides a critical evaluation of the theory of totalitarianism by H. Arendt, particularly her central thesis that totalitarian society comes into being in modern atomized society. Namely, totalitarianism is characterized, on the one hand, by an artificialist project of organization, and, on the other, by a substantialist ideal of incorporation: both are realized in the Party, which is not only devised as an organization, but is also a "mystical person" in which all its members are brought together. As such, it incorporates the people. The figure of the indivisible people is put forward in the Party; the figure of the indivisible party is put forward in the figure of the people. In the first, organizational aspect the Party contains the project of an organisable whole, while in the other, substantialist aspect it contains the project of an incorporable whole. Adapted from the source document.
