Politics as it is practiced in America is obsolete. It is a simulation of democracy. It seems to have very little to do with democracy any more.
How do we get back to (or, more accurately, move forward to) being a real democracy?
Here’s my answer: By understanding the lifework of Claude Lefort, the greatest thinker of democracy of our time.
By understanding Lefort’s writings.
Lefort died on October 3, 2010 at age 86.
Lefort was both a radical and a liberal; a socialist and a democrat.
He received a lot of recognition during his lifetime, but it should have been much more. He didn’t get as much recognition as the famous so-called “postmodernist” French thinkers like Baudrillard and Barthes. I have ranked Lefort #5 on my list of the Top 100 Post-World War II French thinkers, just behind his mentor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and just ahead of Baudrillard. Lefort edited Merleau-Ponty’s great posthumous work The Visible and the Invisible.
Lefort correctly pointed out that political philosophy is something entirely separate from philosophy.
During the intellectual adventures of my youth, I first came into contact with the radical side of Lefort’s political philosophy. Later I came into contact with the liberal side. Both are extremely important…