ingram

THE POLITICS OF CLAUDELEFORT’S POLITICAL:BETWEEN LIBERALISM ANDRADICAL DEMOCRACY1

James D. Ingram

ABSTRACT Claude Lefort’s rethinking of ‘the political’ has been highly fruitfulfor political theory, yet its politics remain unclear. It has inspired transforma-tive, radical-democratic projects, but has also served as a basis for more liberalconceptions. This article explores the sources and implications of this ambigu-ity by setting Lefort’s work against the backdrop of the anti-totalitarian momentin French political thought and the trajectories of two of his students, MiguelAbensour and Marcel Gauchet. It emerges that although Lefort’s democratictheory cannot be reduced to a defensive liberalism, neither is it as expansiveas some might hope.

KEYWORDS Miguel Abensour • Marcel Gauchet • Claude Lefort • liberal-ism • radical democracy • ‘the political’

Claude Lefort is often credited with launching the ‘return of politicalphilosophy’ in France, yet the political valence of his thinking, like that ofthis return, is by no means self-evident. Indeed, Lefort’s contribution to politi-cal theory, like the broader movement of which it was a part, may beconstrued in two opposite ways. On the one hand, Lefort’s work has beenhighly fruitful for radical-democratic, post-Marxist and deconstructive politi-cal theory. His theorization of ‘the political’ as a symbolic order, and moderndemocracy as constituted by ‘an empty space of power’, are rightly cele-brated as central contributions to an open-ended, post-foundational, radi-cally democratic political theory (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Nancy andLacoue-Labarthe, 1997 [1981)). On the other hand, his work can be read as

Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 33–50SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op LtdDOI: 10.1177/0725513606068774

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participating in the attack on radical politics that led the French intellectualleft on its deflationary course from May ’68 to a depoliticized ‘republic ofthe centre’. By decisively rejecting Marxism, underlining the dangers of revol-ution, and depicting democracy first and foremost in contrast to totali-tarianism, Lefort helped pioneer a generational shift away from the radical,transformative tradition and toward reconciliation with ‘normal’ liberal-constitutional politics. Lefort’s ideas, then, can be associated with radicaliza-tion or restoration, the deepening or limiting of democracy, awakening froman old ideological slumber or falling into a new one.2 It is this ambiguity –the ‘politics’ of Lefort’s ‘political’ – that I seek to explore here.

I interrogate Lefort’s rethinking of the political in light of a centraldivision in contemporary political theory, a division that splits the hyphenin liberal-democratic thinking. Though often assumed to go together, liber-alism and democracy are distinct, at times antagonistic, principles (Geuss,2001; Mouffe, 2000). Democracy designates a form of rule: rule by thepeople. Liberalism does not; there is no ‘liberocracy’. Liberalism is a theoryand practice of limiting rule for the sake of individual freedom. There canbe illiberal democracy (the classical polis) and anti-democratic liberalism(constitutional monarchy), though today of course the preference is for ahybrid, with popular sovereignty checked by the rule of law, individual andminority rights, a division of powers and so on. Nevertheless, the fissurebetween liberal and radical democracy, central to the politics of 19th-centuryEurope, has re-opened in recent years on the academic left. Today’s liberalsand radical democrats agree broadly on aims: they favour a more equitabledistribution of rights, resources and power. Yet how they envision theseaims, and especially the theoretical and political means of pursing them, candiffer profoundly. On one side, (left) liberals emphasize principles, laws andinstitutions that would produce just outcomes, understood in terms of rightsand entitlements. On the other, radical democrats emphasize the politics thatwould lead to a more just society, understood in terms of power and partici-pation. To radical democrats, liberals can seem conservative, moralistic, ratio-nalistic and indifferent to politics; to liberals, radical democrats can seemreckless, amoral, antirational and indifferent to normative questions.3 At stakein this debate is at once the nature of democracy, what it is and can become,and the task of political theory, how it can promote freedom and equality.

A liberal/radical democratic frame not only helps locate Lefort’s politicsin contemporary debates, it also helps situate him in his historical context.For with the evaporation of Marxism, this opposition became one of the keyideological axes within Lefort’s milieu. As we will see, however, even withinthis context he cuts an ambiguous figure. I therefore propose to explore theimplications of his thought as they were elaborated in the work of two ofhis most accomplished students, Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour.While both started from a position very near Lefort’s around 1970 – a non-Marxist, libertarian4 leftism – Gauchet embarked on a journey from anarchism

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to liberalism to republicanism, while Abensour remained closer to the spiritof the 1960s, moving toward radical democracy. What is remarkable aboutthese contrasting careers is that both were decisively shaped by Lefort; intheir work we see in a sense the realization of two possibilities latent in histhinking. After laying out the central features of Lefort’s rethinking of demo-cratic politics in the first part of this article, I explore these different possi-bilities in the second. In the third part I use them to sharpen the contoursof Lefort’s own position. Although the bases of a sophisticated form of radicaldemocratic thinking can be found in Lefort’s theory, I conclude that elabor-ating it may require a radical rethinking of his notion of ‘the political’.

I. DEMOCRACY, POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL

A point of entry into Lefort’s distinctive thinking of the political can behad via two common understandings of politics, one typically associatedwith liberal, the other with radical-democratic theory. The first views politicsin terms of the common good and the proper constitution of the community.This understanding underlies the main current of political philosophy fromPlato and Aristotle to Rawls, with its focus on ‘constitutional essentials’ andits search for a just and stable order. This view is holistic and normative,and implies a perspective on society that is at once external and from thetop, as reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary’s principal definition ofpolitics: the ‘science and art of government; the science dealing with theform, organization, and administration of a state or part of one’ – or, at amore theoretical level: ‘that branch of moral philosophy dealing with thestate or social organism as a whole’. The second understanding conceivesof politics in terms of power, as competition for rule and resources and thejockeying of different interests and ideologies. This view, which the OEDnotes is generally ‘unfavourable’, is classically expressed in Harold Lasswell’sformula: ‘who gets what, where and how’. It has another genealogy, stretch-ing from Machiavelli to Marx to Weber to Foucault, whose emphasis onpower and conflict tends to be shared by today’s radical democrats. Ofcourse, most reflections on politics try to strike a balance between the twonotions, between the whole and the parts, idealism and realism. Lefort’s isno exception. What sets him apart is his way of doing so.

Lefort’s theoretical innovations are based in his understanding ofpolitics as a symbolic domain. This is the root of his particular way of char-acterizing the relation between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘the political’ (lepolitique), a distinction his work has done much to revive.5 ‘The political’usually corresponds to the first understanding of politics, politics-as-regime;le politique translates the Greek politeia (polity) as well as politikos (poli-tician or statesman). ‘Politics’ (la politique), by contrast, usually correspondsto the second, conflictual understanding. Lefort does not disagree, defining‘politics’ as competition for public power and decisions about its use. His

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contribution, drawing on his phenomenological apprenticeship with MauriceMerleau-Ponty, is to give ‘the political’ a reflexive turn. For Lefort ‘the politi-cal’ is a society’s way of representing its wholeness or unity to itself, ofunderstanding itself as a collectivity. As he describes it, politics in the broadsense involves not only the shaping (mise-en-forme) of collective life, theself-production and reproduction of society, but also the staging (mise-en-scène), the self-representation and interpretation, of those relations. Onlythe two together, collective relations and actors’ understandings of them,give (objective) form and (subjective) meaning (mise-en-sens) to society(1988: 11–12, 217–21 [1981, 1983]). These dimensions are inextricably inter-woven: the ‘objective’ form of political life always depends on the senseactors make of it. Thus, for Lefort ‘[r]eflection on the political and reflectionon politics are at once distinct and intertwined’ (2000 [1992]: 138).

For Lefort, ‘the political’ constitutes society’s unity by projecting it ontoa point of ‘power’, which he understands as a symbolic location. A ‘primi-tive’ society might recognize its unity in custom or the cosmos. Under abso-lutism, the monarch takes up this function, mediating between society andthe transcendent authority of divine right: the king had ‘two bodies’ onKantorowitz’s analysis because the second, immortal body stood for the unityof society. The modern regimes Lefort has analysed in depth, democracyand totalitarianism, both respond to the problem that arises when the king,the embodiment of social unity, is overthrown and the symbolic place ofpower falls to society. The two regimes are closely related in being solu-tions to the same problem, the detranscendentalisation of authority. Lefortunderstands totalitarianism as an effort to place society itself – ‘the people’– in the place of power and unity, ‘to weld power and society back togetheragain, to efface all signs of social division, to banish the indetermination thathaunts the democratic experience’ (1986 [1979]: 305). Since the people arein fact always plural and divided, however, this can only be done by meansof violence and repression, by abolishing ‘politics’. Democracy, in contrast,is a way of leaving the symbolic place of power left by the departed kingempty. By fostering competition among actors and principles, it prevents anysingle one from standing in for the unity of society. A democratic society isthus one in which power, legitimacy, identity and unity remain in question,where the conflicts of ‘politics’ themselves make up ‘the political’.

The key to Lefort’s analysis of modern democracy is the symbolic voidat its heart. Because the political is a realm of representation, it always includesan element of the imaginary: there is always a gap between a society’s self-representation of its unity and its real divisions. While every society imaginesitself as unified, this unity can never be achieved. The overcoming of socialand political alienation – as promised, for example, by Rousseau’s volontégénérale or Marx’s communist revolution – is in principle impossible. Thedecisive difference between democracy and totalitarianism, then, is thattotalitarianism is based on the idea that a society can be identical to its idea



of itself (1986: ch. 8 [1980]). Democracy, in contrast, preserves the irreducibledifference between society’s unified self-conception and its real division bykeeping the place of power open. Some are selected to rule, but they donot embody the community. This necessary gap between the imaginary andthe real leads to an important insight about the relation between normativ-ity (usually associated with the first view of politics) and conflict (usuallyassociated with the second). On Lefort’s view, the ideas that define a society’saspirations or understandings of the good – justice, humanity, democracy,equality, right6 – escape any particular articulation or instantiation. Politicalalienation, the condition in which one cannot identify entirely with societyand how it is governed, is irreducible. Yet precisely this alienation guaran-tees the transcendent status of a society’s animating principles: society’sinability to correspond to its idea of itself provides the terms in which itsactual arrangements can be contested (Weymans, 2005: 264–70).7

Lefort’s theorization of modern democracy thus implies a revision ofthe relation between the two senses of politics. Normative political theory,from Plato to Rawls, tends to view conflict as an obstacle to or corruptionof order and harmony: a normative view of society overcomes, contains orabstracts away from conflict. This in turn implies a particular relationbetween theory and practice: first we arrive at a holistic ideal for society,then we worry about implementing it – possibly through politics-as-conflict.Lefort overturns this picture. For him, the democratic ‘political’ is defined bycompetition between different interests and ideals. Lefort credits this viewto Machiavelli, who saw the ongoing struggle between the great, who seekto rule, and the many, who seek not to be ruled, as the key to a strong andvirtuous republic. Rather than a contingent aspect of a political order, letalone a defect, conflict is at the heart of the regime. As Lefort sums upMachiavelli’s view: ‘dissensions, far from being destructive of all civil life,are generative thereof’. This throws into question any normative reflectionon politics in the traditional mode, in terms of an ideal regime, as well asany view of politics that would reduce it to government, to implementingsome such ideal: ‘Machiavelli is abandoning the idea of a harmonious city,one governed by the best, whose constitution would be conceived as a wayof warding off the danger of innovations and would proceed from the knowl-edge of the ultimate ends of man and the city’ (2000: 132–3 [1992]). Instead,conflict is constitutive of the regime. Even the normative content of politics,a society’s idea of justice and its best self, arises from and is realized throughcontestation. Modern democracy for Lefort is nothing other than thiscondition made permanent.

II. LIBERAL AND RADICAL DEMOCRACY

I want to suggest that the central elements of Lefort’s understandingof modern democracy – the empty place of power, the ineradicability of



political alienation, the production and reproduction of the public spacethrough conflict – lend themselves to two very different conceptions of thetasks and possibilities of democratic politics. On the one hand, we can regardpolitical alienation as a necessary limit. The main danger to democracywould then be trespassing this limit, succumbing to the totalitarian tempta-tion to fuse power and the social. This is the view of liberalism, which seeksto accommodate politics-as-conflict within a legal and institutional order thatstabilizes it and keeps it within certain bounds. On the other hand, we canemphasize conflict and dissention as themselves constitutive of democracy,as necessary to maintain its openness. On this view, the main danger todemocracy would be freezing or institutionalizing a particular arrangementof power. Politics-as-conflict is always necessary to renew politics-as-regimeby challenging its limits. This is the view of radical democracy. These twopossibilities coexist in Lefort’s conception of democracy, and for the mostpart he refuses to choose between them.

In order to spell out these two possibilities, I propose a double detour:first through the context in which Lefort’s theory took form and attainedprominence, then through two very different projects that in a sense grewout of it. The context was the French intellectual left in the 1970s as it wasshaken by ‘l’affaire Soljenitsyne ’ or ‘le choc du Goulag ’, the curious shift bywhich, in the course of a few years and in response to facts that had beenknown for decades, an intellectual milieu that had long revolved aroundMarxism suddenly turned against it with a fury that matched its earlierembrace. Lefort anticipated this turn by at least two decades. Along withCornelius Castoriadis and their comrades at Socialisme ou barbarie in the1950s and 1960s, he was among the first in France to mount a serious critiqueof communism from the left. With his essays on totalitarianism and a timelybook on Solzhenitsyn (1976), he stood at the very centre of the volte-faceof the 1970s. This turn, however, brought together a wide variety of differ-ent figures and positions, from the Cold War liberalism of Raymond Aron tothe anarchistic poststructuralism of Foucault or Deleuze to the anti-politicalpolemics of ‘Nouveaux Philosophes’ like André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy. At the time Lefort was associated with the independent, liber-tarian left. Inspired by the emancipatory energies of May ’68, this currentsought to free itself from the authoritarian tendencies it saw not only inSoviet Marxism, but also in the French Communist Party, which, allied withMitterand’s Socialists, seemed poised to take power. Yet even within thisbroad grouping, the anti-totalitarian impetus gave rise to distinct, evenopposing, currents.8

This can be illustrated by two classics that emerged from this milieu.Pierre Clastres’ Society against the State (1989 [1974]) extended this anti-authoritarianism to the state writ large, arguing on the basis of ethnologicalresearch that tribal peoples organized themselves so as to make the state,and thus political domination as such, impossible. The lesson was anarchist,



and found wide resonance among post-’68 gauchistes. François Furet’s Inter-preting the French Revolution (1981 [1978]), in contrast, which marked anepochal shift in the historiography of the Revolution, turned the same animusagainst the Jacobins and their latter-day Marxist apologists. Seeing the JacobinTerror as continuous with 20th-century totalitarianism, Furet argued that onlya century after the Revolution did France start to inoculate itself against thedangers of democratic excess and ‘end the Revolution’ by means of liberalinstitutions. Lefort sat somewhere between these currents. On one flank, hereproached Clastres for ignoring the differences between regimes anddreaming of an emancipation ‘beyond’ politics (2000: ch. 12 [1987]). On theother, he criticized Furet for reducing the Revolution to an ideology anddenying its role in establishing democracy (1988: ch. 5 [1980]). Lefort rejected,in other words, the anarchist as well as the liberal attempt to find a safehaven for democracy beyond the uncertainties of politics. Yet his ownalternative remained hard to discern.

To indicate two possible resolutions of this ambiguity I turn to two ofLefort’s intellectual inheritors, Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour. Gauchethas written extensively on democracy, rights, psychology and education, butis probably best known for his work on the history of religion. At the helmof the journal Le Débat, he was at the very centre of the French liberal turnaround 1980. Abensour’s manuscripts are fewer and shorter, notably twobooks late in his career on Marx and utopianism. In contrast to Gauchet’sgrand historical-philosophical panoramas, he has hewed closer to Lefort’sstyle of theoretical commentary, writing on figures ranging from Saint-Justto Pierre Leroux, Arendt to Adorno, Clastres to Lévinas. But his greatest influ-ence has probably come through the series he edited at Éditions Payot begin-ning in 1974, ‘Critique de la politique’, which among other things introducedFrance to the Frankfurt School. Both men began their careers on the anti-totalitarian left at the turn of the 1970s. In 1976 they collaborated on anedition of la Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, with essays by Lefortand Clastres. But already their paths were diverging. Gauchet accompaniedmany in his cohort on its ideological odyssey from anti-totalitarianismthrough rights-based liberalism in the late 1970s to republicanism in the1980s. Abensour, by contrast, remained true to the libertarian politics of ’68,eventually reconnecting Lefortian politics with Marx. Nevertheless, both canbe plausibly regarded as Lefort’s heirs.9 How, then, did they take such differ-ent paths?

Gauchet began studying with Lefort in Normandy in the 1960s, later co-authoring Lefort’s first extended essay in democratic theory (1971). In Parishe became close to Clastres. In the course of the 1970s, however, Gauchetdrifted increasingly toward Furet, who was battling the ghosts of Jacobinism,seeking to detach democracy from revolution and fasten it to liberalism.Gauchet soon reached similar conclusions. He came to see, with Furet andagainst Clastres, that it is not enough to be ‘against the state’; the rights of



society, now understood as the rights of man, need protection against power,including the power of the democratic state. These considerations led Gauchetto liberal constitutionalism and Benjamin Constant (1980): by subordinatingpopular sovereignty to individual rights, the rule of law and a neutral state,Gauchet sought to defuse the dangers of democracy by, in Samuel Moyn’sphrase, pitting ‘the state against the state’ (2005: 175). Yet a peculiarity of hisevolution emerges when we consider his subsequent work as it ventured intothe philosophy of history. In The Disenchantment of the World (1997 [1985])Gauchet fills in the gaps in Lefort’s account of how authority wends its wayfrom the cosmos to God to the king to the people. What is striking inGauchet’s story is the role of democracy: regarding it as a candidate for thisrole, he follows Furet in warning of the havoc it can wreck under the nameof popular sovereignty. Democracy, then, is a permanent threat to itself. Thisproblematic persists even as Gauchet turns against liberalism in the 1980s and1990s: democracy figures as a principle of power and sovereignty, even if itsparadoxical consequence is to undermine itself by creating a depoliticizedsociety of individuals (1989; 2002a: chs. 12, 13 [2000]).

We can see the one-sidedness of this understanding by turning toAbensour. He too worked closely with Lefort and Clastres in the 1970s, butthen turned to radical rather than liberal thought. Rather than follow thedetails of this trajectory, I turn to its fruit, La démocratie contre l’état (2004[1997]). Here the allusion to Clastres refers not, like Gauchet, to a principleto be protected from politics (the rights of man), but to one that challengesthe state and seeks to transform it (‘insurgent’ or ‘insurrectional’ democracy).The book consists mainly of a reading of Marx’s 1843 manuscripts, the longdraft of what was to become the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.According to Abensour, in contrast to Marx’s position in 1842, when heturned to the ‘French moderns’ and revolutionary republicanism, or 1844,when, in Lefort’s terms, he began to identify the political with the social, in1843 Marx took up the question of politics per se. On Abensour’s reading,in 1843 Marx rejects his earlier, republican conception of the state as theseat of ‘political intelligence’. But instead of opposing it to material socialrelations, as he soon would, he counterposes it to the ‘total demos’, the sumof popular political energies. As a Lefortian, Abensour knows that politicalalienation cannot simply be overcome – and so, he claims, did Marx, at leastin this manuscript. While the demos surges up to demand ‘true democracy’,it can never be realized. These insurrectionary ‘Machiavellian moments’ arethe engine of democratization: the demos challenges existing institutions,struggling to achieve more democracy and sometimes in some measuresucceeding. This effort, which remains forever incomplete, underlies demo-cratic progress. ‘Democracy’, writes Abensour, ‘like an impetuous river thatincessantly overflows its bed, cannot “go back home” and submit to theestablished order’ (2002: 708 [1994]). Its indeterminacy sets in motion anendless logic of challenge and transformation.



We may at this point need to be reminded that Gauchet and Abensourare discussing the same thing. For where Gauchet writes about democracyin its symbolic dimension, as a principle of authority, for Abensour it is aprocess of social transformation; where Gauchet treats it as a form ofsovereign power, for Abensour it is a way of contesting power; whereGauchet considers it as a regime, a form of the political, for Abensour itfigures mainly as a politics. Thus, where Gauchet, following Furet, seesdemocracy as dangerous, as potentially totalitarian, Abensour takes a phrasefrom Lefort, ‘la démocratie sauvage’ – wild or savage democracy, a formulawell chosen to antagonize Furet or Gauchet – and gives it a strongly affir-mative inflection:

Haunted by its recognition of a being that is indeterminate par excellence,democracy is that form of society in which [right], by its external relationshipto power, proves to be always in excess of what is established, as if the insti-tuting instance, once posited, reemerges . . . to reaffirm . . . existing rights andto create new ones. (2002: 709 [1994])

For Abensour, in short, democratic incompletion goes all the way down.Democracy is not only Gauchet’s regime or sovereign principle; in its incom-pletion, it is the form of the political that provokes a specifically democraticpolitics that rises up to contest this regime itself.

This difference appears in stark relief in a recent exchange betweenthem. When in a collection of interviews Gauchet dismissed Abensour’s‘revoltism’ (sic) – ‘I can see nothing in this irresponsible radicalism but acorruption of democracy’ – Abensour was moved to publish a ‘savage’response. Abensour pinpoints their disagreement with reference to Gauchet’scharacterization of their common point of departure. Gauchet had written,‘Certainly, democracy constitutes an “unsurpassable framework” [un cadreindépassable] by which one breaks with revolution’ (2003: 160–1). Abensourbegs to differ, and his dissent can be expressed in terms of one of Lefort’ssignature ideas, ‘democratic invention’ (the French title under which manyof Lefort’s best-known essays were collected in 1981). For Gauchet, democ-racy is invented in the revolution that overthrows tyranny (1776, 1789, 1848and so on); thereafter it serves as a framework for politics which revolutioncan only threaten. For Abensour, in contrast, since democracy is neverachieved, revolutionary democratic invention can and should be ongoing:

If you agree to see in democracy something other than a political regime . . .if you recognize in it a specific political institution of the social that accom-modates conflict rather than hides it, that multiplies the spaces for collectiveinvention, that circulates the will to autonomy in all spheres of the social, thatprovokes a series of experiences of political freedom . . . then, far from beingfrozen into its result, a form, it is to be conceived as a process, an endlessbreakthrough. (2004 [1997]: 162)



Gauchet, it need hardly be said, does not agree; for him ‘the philosophy ofdemocracy and the imaginary of subversive radicalism are a bad mix’ (2003:160). So let us ask, does Lefort agree? And should we?

III. LEFORT’S DELICATE BALANCE

We should first acknowledge the obstacles to reading Lefort as apositive or normative theorist. He is much less given than his former studentsto position-taking. In part, this stems from his practice of political theory.Lefort’s most important insights come by way of interpretations; his positioncan often be read only through his criticisms of the positions of others. Evenin his more systematic work, he tends to present himself as an analyst ofthe political and its different forms, seeking to understand the differencesbetween them rather than to argue for one or the other (though his sympa-thies are clearly with democracy). If Abensour inherits the first tendency,presenting his advocacy through commentary, Gauchet inherits the second,claiming the impartiality of dispassionate analysis (cf. Abensour, 2003;Gauchet, 2002b). But the difficulty of pinning Lefort down is also a matterof temperament. He is drawn to ambiguity, difficulty and complexity, toproblems that can only be expressed as tensions, dilemmas, aporias andparadoxes. His essays typically sharpen questions rather than reachconclusions. For every thesis, he finds a hidden presupposition; for everyinterpretation, a missing element that exposes its one-sidedness. Lefort hasexpressed this through an analogy between democracy and philosophy: likethe regime to which he has devoted so much reflection, he conceives of hiswork as forever provisional and incomplete (2000: ch. 13 [1985]).

But there are deeper, as it were structural reasons for his political ambi-guity. One is an obvious yet seldom noted characteristic of his theory ofdemocracy: it is almost entirely negative. Consider the contrast he developsto totalitarianism: its essence is that totalitarianism does something thatdemocracy does not – fill the symbolic place of power. Indeed, democracy’sdistinguishing feature for Lefort is not, say, freedom, equality or the powerof the people, but indeterminacy, a negative property that leaves its positivecontent open. A second reason relates to his analytical perspective and stemsfrom his phenomenological background. Focusing on representation, on ‘thepolitical’, Lefort seldom considers the claims and projects of ‘politics’. In thissense, his work has a holistic bias. Even as he stresses plurality and inde-terminacy, he considers them from the perspective of the whole; even as heaffirms politics-as-conflict, it is so to speak theoretically reabsorbed back intopolitics-as-regime. To the extent that Lefort conceives of democracy as aregime, then, it is hardly surprising that he can be read as arguing that thisregime needs to be institutionalized and protected – that it is, in Gauchet’sphrase, an ‘unsurpassable framework’.

Nevertheless, central elements of Lefort’s thought exclude a concep-tion of democracy as defensive as Gauchet’s. Lefort contrasts his own notion



of democracy to one that fixes indeterminacy within certain bounds: ‘moderndemocracy invites us to replace the notion of a regime governed by laws,of a legitimate power, by the notion of a regime founded upon the legiti-macy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate – a debatewhich is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end’ (1988: 39[1984]). ‘There is no law that can be fixed’, he affirms, ‘whose articles cannotbe contested, whose foundations are not susceptible of being called intoquestion’ (1986: 303 [1979]). Even in essays on great 19th-century liberals(Guizot, Tocqueville), Lefort is at pains to point out the respects in whichthey transcend conventional liberalism. In an essay on Tocqueville he specifi-cally rejects Constant’s view, embraced by Gauchet in the late 1970s,10 thatthe freedom of the moderns is first and foremost private, individual freedom:

although political freedom itself is a product of history, it is not reducible toa system of institutions designed to protect individual freedom; both freedomsstem from the same cause, namely emancipation from any personal authoritywhich can arrogate the power to take decisions affecting the destiny of all inaccordance with its own ends. Political freedom in its turn becomes uncondi-tional: it reveals the essence of the political. (1988: 170 [1982])

In the end, two central elements of Lefort’s political theory, both takenup by Abensour, make it incompatible with a defensive, liberal conceptionof democracy. We have already seen the first: the excess of right beyondany particular instantiation of right. This ensures that the principle of democ-racy can never coincide with its actual institutions or governors, and permitsthem to be contested in the name of democracy itself. In this sense democ-racy not only legitimizes the use of power, as for Gauchet; it also providesa basis for challenging it. But, and this is the second element, this expan-sive logic does not realize itself by itself. In an essay on Salman Rushdie,Lefort quotes the novelist: ‘“How is freedom gained? It is taken: never given”’.Lefort elaborates: ‘In democracy itself, the institution of individual and politi-cal freedoms couldn’t make one forget that freedom is not given; speechalways requires an interruption of the ordered relations among men, a rightthat exceeds all definition, a sort of violence’ (2000: 31 [1991]). Realizingdemocracy requires action and contestation; it must be set to work by citizens– sometimes, as Abensour underlines, against the state.

These themes attain clearest expression in an essay Lefort wrote at theheight of the French left’s largely anti-political turn to human rights in 1980(1986: ch. 7 [1980]; see also 1988: ch. 2 [1984]). Lefort’s contribution was toinsist that rights are political, even revolutionary. What is politically import-ant about rights, he argues, is a feature they share with democracy: theirinherent expansiveness. ‘The rights of man reduce right to a basis which . . .is without shape . . . and, for this reason, eludes all power which wouldclaim to take hold of it – whether religious or mythical, monarchical orpopular’. Consequently, ‘these rights go beyond any particular formulationwhich has been given of them; and this means that their formulation contains



the demand for their reformulation’. Rights are not established once and forall but invented and reinvented by political actors; they are not just the frame-work but also the product and object of struggle. The revolutionary Decla-ration of the Rights of Man and Citizen transforms politics into ‘the theatreof a contestation whose object cannot be reduced to the preservation of atacitly established pact but which takes form in centres that power cannotentirely master’ (1986: 258 [1980]). Revealingly, Gauchet rejected this sugges-tion, responding that human rights cannot be a politics because they do notincorporate a principle of power (2002a: ch. 1 [1980]).11 When he publishedhis own account of the rights of man in 1989, he instead emphasized theirrelation to the creation and representation of social power through popularsovereignty.

Yet this does not mean that Lefort’s politics can be assimilated toAbensour’s, as we see when the latter elaborates his vision of ‘savage democ-racy’ in his riposte to Gauchet:

[D]emocracy is not a crystallised form . . . that establishes an organisation ofpowers and rules of the game; it is rather a continuous movement, a politicalaction that in its very manifestation works to undo [défaire] the state-form, tostop its logic (domination, totalisation, mediation, integration) in order toreplace it with its own, that of the sovereign people, by struggling againstmystificatory reconciliations and fallacious integrations. Democracy is the deter-minate institution of a conflictual space, a space against, an agonistic stage onwhich two antagonistic logics confront one another: the autonomisation of thestate as form, and the life of the people as action, political action. (2004: 164)

Two ideas here are foreign to Lefort’s thinking. The first, evident in thephrases ‘the sovereign people’ and ‘the life of the people’, supposes that itis possible for ‘the people’ to act as a collective subject – an idea with aplace perhaps in Castoriadis’s work, but not in Lefort’s. Indeed, Lefort, forwhom ‘the sovereign people’ can only be a principle of representation, criti-cized his former compagnon de route for portraying ‘a society able to masterits own development and to communicate with all its parts’ (1976–7: 185).12

The second, which identifies the ‘state-form’ with domination, recalls notLefort but Clastres. In this case, Lefort rebuked his friend by insisting thatthe democratic state can be an instrument of freedom and equality as wellas oppression and hierarchy (2000: 216–18 [1987]). One can certainly askwhether Lefort’s theory affords a place for examining power in its concrete,repressive rather than symbolic form – as Abensour implicitly does when heproposes pairing the ‘philosophy of politics’ (Lefort and Arendt) with the‘critique of domination’ (the Frankfurt School) (2003). Still, as with the notionof the sovereign people, here Lefort’s position has much to recommend it:even if we reject the Idealist identification of freedom with the state, wemight hesitate before concluding the opposite.



IV. BEYOND THE POLITICAL?

Is it possible to retain the central insight of Abensour’s reading of Lefort– that democracy is a regime distinguished by its open-ended potential forpoliticization and democratization – without falling into the trap of substan-tializing the people or reducing political order to the one-dimensional poleof domination? Is it possible to combine the gains of Lefort’s phenomen-ology of the democratic political, with its recognition of the inevitability ofrepresentation and alienation, with a radical democratic theory? In conclusion,I want to suggest that it is, though this is not without implications for thenotion of ‘the political’. Indeed, we can take the main ingredients from Leforthimself, in particular from a 1985 lecture on Hannah Arendt (1988: ch. 3).France came late to Arendt, mostly because she was introduced as an anti-communist thinker, notably by Raymond Aron, and subsequently ignored bythe marxisant intellectual left. Lefort seeks to correct this neglect, offeringa generous survey of her thought that emphasizes their many points incommon: her phenomenological approach; her effort to think in responseto particular events; her praise of active citizenship and the intersubjectiveconstitution of a shared world; her fears of the authoritarian elements ofmodern society and of philosophy; and her understanding of totalitarianism(but see Lefort, 2002). Of particular interest, however, are his criticisms,which take up only a page but are rich in implications.

Lefort begins by questioning ‘the clear-cut distinction she establishesbetween the political realm and the private realm, and the related distinc-tion between political equality and social inequality’. It is worth asking, hesuggests, ‘which circumstances, which conflicts – and they can only havebeen social – and which aims . . . led highly differentiated and hierarchicalsocieties to accept that peasants, shopkeepers and artisans should beadmitted to assemblies in which decisions concerning public affairs weretaken’. He reproaches her for avoiding these questions, and, against her viewthat the French Revolution was derailed by demands for social equality,argues that these demands were inseparable from the struggle for democ-racy. He takes issue with her scepticism about human rights, observing that‘it is difficult to see the philosophical basis for the argument that the mutualrecognition of individuals as being made in one another’s likeness must stopat the gates of the City’. And he objects to her excision of the moral fromthe political, insisting that ‘the distinction between truth and lies, good andevil, just and unjust, real and imaginary [is] constitutive of political thought,or even of thought in general’ (1988: 53–4 [1985]). He concludes that thesedeficiencies stem from Arendt’s idealization of the ancient polis and lack ofinterest in the specificity of modern representative democracy.

Whatever we make of this diagnosis, let us consider Lefort’s own workin light of these points. To be sure, Lefort is well aware of the shiftingcontours of public and private; the causes and consequences of what he



calls, following Tocqueville, ‘equality of condition’; the inherently expansivelogic of modern democracy; and the importance of normative ideas topolitics. What he does not do – owing mainly, I suggested, to his negativeconception of democracy and his holistic perspective – is pursue theirpositive implications. By insisting against Arendt that the struggle againstsocial inequality can be productive of political equality, for instance, Lefortgestures toward what Étienne Balibar analyses as the extension and deepen-ing of rights and democracy through struggle (e.g. 2002 [1997]). Though itdoes not loom large in his work, Lefort recognizes the importance ofstruggles for equality to democracy: ‘it is precisely the opposition and thedemands of those who are excluded from the benefits of democracy thatconstitute its most effective wellspring’ (Lefort and Thibaud, 1979: 34). Thissuggests an alternative to conceiving of democracy in terms of popular sover-eignty or ‘the life of the people’: we can see democratic politics in part asa struggle against the limits of democracy as institutionalized at a given placeand time. With Abensour, we can understand this process as setting democ-racy-as-politics against democracy-as-regime. Gauchet’s phrase ‘democracyagainst itself’ (2002a) would then represent not a threat to democracy, butthe engine of its realization.

This theme returns in another form when Lefort questions Arendt’srestriction of rights to a political community. Here we see the tensionbetween the universalistic impetus of the principles of political modernity(democracy, human rights) and the bounds of any particular society, includ-ing a democratic one. Lefort has tentatively explored this ground as well. Inan essay on humanism he argues that the value of the ‘human’ lies in itsrefusal to reduce the person to a (liberal) individual, a (national) patriot ora (republican) citizen; like democracy, the appellation ‘human’ is inherentlyopen, expansive and universalistic (2000: 22 [1991]). And in a reflection onthe tradition of proposals for ‘perpetual peace’, Lefort argues against ‘realists’like Raymond Aron that the transcendence of right over fact means that wecannot reject the possibility that ‘the conjunction of the idea of humanitywith that of right can take on some meaning’. Since ‘right does not stop atthe State’s borders’, there is at least a basis for thinking that internationalorder could rest on an idea of justice rather than simply on a balance ofpower among states (2000: 155, 156 [1986]). Yet this calls attention to thefact that the political, as theorized not only by Lefort but also by Gauchetand Abensour, remains, almost by default, a stubbornly national thing.

Together these points raise a possibility suggested by Lefort’s essay onrights as well as Abensour’s ‘democracy against the state’: that democracybecomes ‘more democratic’ when democratic politics challenges a givendemocratic regime, ‘deepening’ or ‘extending’ actually-existing democracyby contesting its legal, social or territorial limits. Here we might considerJacques Rancière’s complaint that ‘the political’, with its tacit acceptance ofthe limits of a given political realm, may be a means of defending that realm



against outsiders (2002: 13–14, 225–6). For Rancière, whose work hasfocused on nothing other than how ‘peasants, shopkeepers and artisans’fought for equality and inclusion, ‘politics’ is the process through which thelimits of ‘the political’ are exposed and challenged by those whom itexcludes. The implicit holism and closure of democracy-as-regime, onthis view, may place it in tension with the expansive logic of democracy-as-politics; ‘the political’ may be an obstacle to democratization. FollowingRancière, it might then seem that the democratic successor to ‘society againstthe state’ (Clastres) would not be ‘the state against the state’ (Gauchet) oreven ‘democracy against the state’ (Abensour) but ‘democracy against thepolitical’, or any particular version of it. Lefort would no doubt point outthat with this move we remain within the horizon of democracy – and indeedof ‘the political’, which is encompassing by definition. But it suggests reasonto think that if the bases of a more radical and universalistic conception ofdemocracy are available in Lefort’s theory, they may be found at the limitsof his – and our – accustomed definitions of the political.

James D. Ingram is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the New Schoolfor Social Research in New York. He is completing a dissertation on cosmopolitanismand the ethics and politics of universalism. [email: [email protected]]

Notes1. An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference ‘Claude Lefort

and the Nature of the Political’, organized by Mark Blackell, Brian Singer andMatthew Trachman at the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Cultureand Theory, London, Canada, May 2005. I thank them, the other participantsand Raf Greenens for his response, as well as Johannes Angermüller, GilAnidjar, Warren Breckman, Robin Celikates, Dick Howard, Felix Koch and SamMoyn for comments on subsequent versions.

2. The first interpretation is favoured by the left (e.g. Ross, 2002), the second bythe liberal centre (e.g. Khilnani, 1993).

3. The former would include John Rawls, Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore,the latter, Chantal Mouffe, Sheldon Wolin and Wendy Brown. For some articu-lations of this divide, see Benhabib (1996), especially the introduction and essaysby Wolin, Mansbridge, Young, Mouffe and Honig. This is a one-sided debateinsofar as radical democrats usually develop their positions through critiques ofliberals, who for their part seldom take any notice of their would-be antagonists.

4. Here ‘libertarian’ (libertaire) designates left anti-authoritarianism and has nothingto do with the rightwing ultra-liberalism that circulates under this name inEnglish-speaking countries (Hayek, Nozick, Milton Friedman), which has verylittle purchase in France.

5. The key figure for the concept of ‘the political’ is of course Carl Schmitt; otherswhose work bears comparison to Lefort’s on this point include Hannah Arendt,Leo Strauss, Sheldon Wolin and Lefort’s long-time interlocutor CorneliusCastoriadis.



6. ‘Droit ’, mistranslated with distressing regularity as ‘law’. This confusion, invitedby the polysemy of the French droit (like the German Recht), threatens tomake nonsense not only of Lefort but of much post-Kantian political thought.

7. This can be read as a variant of the neo-Kantian figure of the ‘quasi-transcen-dental’, central to Derridean deconstruction as well as Habermasian criticaltheory. The originality of Lefort’s version would be that, unlike Kant’s ‘regu-lative idea’, Derrida’s ‘undeconstructable’ or critical theory’s ‘surplus normativ-ity’, its basis is less transcendental than socio-historical.

8. On this development as a whole, see note 2 above. On the anti-totalitarian leftand Lefort’s place in it, see Christofferson (2004), Breckman (2005) and Howard(2002: chs. 5 and 6).

9. Abensour sees himself this way (2002 [1994]), though he admits he has to‘suspend [lever ] Lefort’s discretion’ to reveal his true radicalism (2004: 160),whereas it is commentators (Doyle, 2003; Weymans, 2004), rather than Gauchethimself (see note 11 below), who claim this status for him. Part III of thepresent article addresses both claims.

10. Gauchet did not remain satisfied with a strictly liberal position, noting thatConstant anticipated Tocqueville’s worry that depoliticizing individual atomismcould open the door to new threats to freedom (e.g. 1980, 1991 [1990]).

11. Gauchet singles out this 1980 essay as the point at which he broke with Lefortand the libertarian left (2003: 159–61).

12. Unlike Castoriadis, Lefort understands democracy on the basis of monotheismand the state, not the ancient polis (Doyle, 2003: 67, 70; Weymans, 2004: 267).In this sense, Lefort, like Gauchet, is more Christian than Greek (Kalyvas, 1999).Abensour, it should be noted, insists that the ‘sovereign people’ or the ‘insti-tuting instance’ (2002: 709) is plural (2004 [1997]: ch. 5). As the grammaticalform of these terms suggests, this is not easily thought.

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