Politics as it is practiced in America is obsolete.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…
This is a generalization, but many thinkers and political actors who were radical in their youth give up their radicalism as they grow older and become liberals. I can’t help but think of Joschka Fischer – the former leader of the German Green Party and Foreign Minister of Germany from 1997 to 2005 – as a prime example of this. Fischer went from being an opponent of war to being a ‘leader’ of wars in Serbia/Kosovo and Afghanistan. The point is to not give up radicalism for liberalism, but rather to be an advocate of both. To understand how the strengths and best values of both can be united. Critique the injustices and alienations of capitalism, but also respect the achievements of capitalism for humanity. See both sides. Respect the deep principles of democracy as enlightened achievements for human civilization, but also see the ways in which we are still living in a fake democracy. When I was a teenager, I came to understand that the leftist critique of American society was essentially correct. However, I also came to understand that the critique that my parents had of leftist ideas and ideologies was also essentially correct. The problem with the Left was its Leninism, its unwillingness to also make a serious critique of the state. Capitalism was a system of injustice and alienation. But state socialism was even worse. Both capitalism and the state were to be critiqued. Historically, it was the anarchists who had understood this. The Marxists (with a few exceptions) had not. The anarchists had the more advanced intelligence of a double-vision. They saw that capitalism and the state were both problems. We must have a sensibility not only to injustice, but to power. (Now I think that we need a triple-vision: to combine elements of anarchism, Marx, and liberalism.) The anarchists in Catalonia in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War fought against both Franco’s fascists and the Soviet Union-supported Communist Party. The conflict among three forces converged in Catalonia. This is all explained lucidly by George Orwell in his book Homage to Catalonia. The students at Nanterre and the Sorbonne (and in cities like Nantes) who made history in France in May-June 1968 were drawn to 19th and 20th century anarchist history. It is covered well by Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit in their book Communism is Obsolete: What Is the Alternative? (title of English translation altered by me). See also Richard Gombin’s The Origins of Modern Leftism and Mark Poster’s Existential Marxism in Postwar France for excellent histories of the intellectual background to 1968 in France. Then it was 1976 and I was twenty years old. What was to be done? I went in search of an alternative leftist set of ideas that did not suffer from the mistakes of Leninism.
BIG MAN on CAMPUS Slavoj Žižek recently published a couple of books celebrating Lenin, and he has recommended that we turn to Lenin. Žižek is a funny guy, so it must be a joke. But I don’t get the joke. Lenin was a mass murderer. Lenin crushed the workers’ councils in factories that were the real heart and soul of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Lenin crushed the movement led by Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine which fought against both the Red and White Armies, resisting state authority, whether capitalist or communist. Lenin crushed the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors in the Gulf of Finland in 1921. All these repressive acts established the precedent for the suppression of workers’ uprisings by Khrushchev in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956, and by Brezhnev in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Some Marxists (I guess Žižek is one of them) believe that Lenin was a brilliant Marxist theoretician. This must also be a joke. Lenin’s second most famous book, after What Is To be Done?, is called State and Revolution. Read this book and you’ll see that Lenin’s so-called ‘theory of the state’ is a non-theory. Lenin’s theorization of the capitalist state is that the state is an ‘instrument’ of the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie). That’s it. He has nothing more to say about the state. That this was the alpha and omega of what Lenin had to say about the state is clearly stated by much more sophisticated Marxist theorists-academicians, in books like The State and Capitalist Society and Class Power and State Power by Ralph Miliband (the father of current British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband) and in essays on the Marxist theory of the state by New York University political science professor Bertell Ollman. Lenin grants no ‘autonomy’ to the state in his theorization of the state under capitalism. As a theory, it is crude and reductionist, a so-called ‘reflection’ theory. Naturally it follows that Lenin is not going to be the guy to have any theory of the post-revolutionary state. Since the capitalist state is nothing but an instrument of the bourgeoisie, therefore the communist or socialist or Marxist or revolutionary state is going to be, for this blind man, nothing more than an instrument of ‘the revolution’. Since the revolution is ‘good’, the revolutionary state must therefore be ‘good’. Puke! Vomit! Barf! Zum Kotzen! Lenin is blind to the oppressiveness of the State and of bureaucracy. This is at odds not only with anarchism, but with Franz Kafka’s The Trial and with the analysis of bureaucracy of the great German sociologist Max Weber. In the late 1970s, I read the books by Richard Gombin and Mark Poster mentioned above. These books made it abundantly clear that the intellectual inspirations of the May-June 1968 student uprising in France (the most important event in postwar French history, along with the Algerian war) – and, by extension, of the social movements in Italy in 1977 – were Sartre’s existentialism and the sociological critique of consumer society and everyday life of Baudrillard, Lefebvre, de Certeau, and the Situationist Guy Debord.
And the political perspective of the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie. L’Internationale Situationniste and Socialisme ou Barbarie were the two most important journals influencing the Parisian students in the 1960s. The leading writers of Socialisme ou Barbarie were Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis (writing under various pseudonyms due to the residency permit problems of the latter). In the early 1950s, Lefort also wrote for Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes. Lefort publicly debated with Sartre, and broke with Sartre, after the publication of Sartre’s apologia for the French Communist Party, The Communists and Peace. Lefort eventually decided that there were still vestiges of a Leninist or state socialist outlook within Castoriadis’ political thought. Lefort went off on his own. Lefort began to publish many important volumes of political science, political philosophy, political theory, and democratic theory.
1968 – Analysis of the events of May 1968 in La Brèche. 1971 – Elements of a Critique of Bureaucracy. 1972 – 800-page book on the political philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli. (I think that Lefort, among many other things, successfully demonstrates in this book that the common idea that we have of ‘Machiavellianism’ as being simply about cynical manipulation is a misreading of Machiavelli). 1975 – Book-length commentary on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. 1978 – Les Formes de l’histoire – Essays in political anthropology. 1978 – Book of essays on Merleau-Ponty. 1981 – Book on the Solidarność trade-union movement and anti-totalitarian revolution in Poland. 1986, 1992, 1999, 2007 – Four additional books on politics.
In the 1970s, Claude Lefort became a professor (‘Directeur d’études’) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (‘School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences’) in Paris. In 1979, when I was 23 years old, I spent a few months in Paris. I knew a Brazilian woman named Nancy Mangabeira Unger who was studying political science at that institute. She was the best friend of my French girlfriend, who taught me French. Claude Lefort was Nancy’s doctoral thesis advisor. Nancy Mangabeira Unger went on to write important books in Portuguese about North-South global economic issues and about ecological thinking. In the Spring of 1981, I was accepted with a full fellowship as a Ph.D. student at the Politics Department of Princeton University. I thought that it might be a good idea to study with Sheldon Wolin, who was an important thinker of democratic liberalism. But I hesitated, because I thought that one must stay very radical while at the same time developing democratic liberal thinking. I didn’t know of any thinkers in North America who were doing this (Richard Rorty had not yet emerged), so I didn’t know with whom I should study. And I didn’t feel morally comfortable with the elitism of Princeton or of the other Ivy League universities. I turned down Princeton. I wanted to live in the East Village in Manhattan for a few years, so I decided to enroll as a sociology Ph.D. student at New York University (NYU). The Sociology Department at NYU was too oriented towards statistical and quantitative methods. I took many courses in quantitative methods there, and am an expert in that. Most of the NYU professors had very little interest in sociological theory, and they laughed at theory. One of them, a famous American sociologist, said to me: ‘Metaphor, Schmetaphor’. I did learn a lot there about Robert K. Merton and Talcott Parsons. Richard Sennett was pretty good, but he operated independently from the department.
One good thing about NYU was that they often had very interesting international guest professors, who came for one semester. In the Fall of 1981, Claude Lefort taught a six-week seminar at the Maison Française at 16 Washington Mews, just north of Washington Square Park. I signed up for that seminar. The professors and administrators of the NYU Maison Française had no idea who Claude Lefort was. They had no idea of the role that he had played in French history. The fact that he had debated with Sartre in the early 1950s. The reality that this guy was one of the greatest political thinkers of the 20th century. They had him teaching a seminar on ‘Introduction to Modern French Civilization’. French Civ 101. At least they didn’t have him driving a taxi.
On second thought, maybe they should have had Lefort driving a taxi. Part time. As real ‘organic intellectuals’ of the working class (as Antonio Gramsci would have said), we should all have some real proletarian experiences (many, but not too much). After the repression of the Prague Spring in 1968, the Czech totalitarian state fired the great neo-Marxist-humanist-Heideggerian philosopher Karel Kosík (author of Dialectics of the Concrete, 1963) from his position at the university, forcing him to drive a bus to earn a living. A good experience for Kosík, I think. Like the professors and administrators of the NYU Maison Française, the other students in the seminar (besides me) had no idea who Claude Lefort was. These were students who had been French majors at various American universities as undergraduates. They were now in the NYU French Studies graduate program. They wanted to go into business and maybe specialize in doing business between America and France. They had all done ‘junior year abroad’ in France. They spoke French well. But their knowledge of French history, literature, and philosophy was only slightly above zero. Because the other students had no idea who Lefort was – and the administrators of the NYU Maison Française, and the community of professors at NYU had no idea who Lefort was – it was left to me to play New York host to him. I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with him, drinking cappuccinos at ‘Caffee Pane e Cioccolato’, and going out to dinner. Lefort knew very few people in New York. He didn’t speak any English, but I was able to speak with him in French. I knew who he was. After the first meeting of the seminar, I went up to him and recited to him the history of the French post-Trotskyist Left in the 1950s and the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire in the late 1940s, the details of his debate with Sartre, the history of what happened in 1968, and the specifics of his ‘non-workerist’ autonomy of social movements thesis in La Brèche. At the end of the six weeks, Lefort’s wife came to New York to join him. He was happy. Lefort was close friends with Bernard Flynn. Flynn is a Professor of Philosophy at Empire State College, and he went on to write what is probably the best book on Lefort, called The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). One time I had a cappuccino with Flynn at “Caffee Pane e Cioccolato.” He was very smart. Lefort wanted me to stay in touch with him, and he wrote to me. I never wrote back. I had writer’s block during the 1980s, and I was embarrassed that I wasn’t producing anything. I never saw him again. However, his death is not the end of our relationship. Ce n’est que le début. It’s just the beginning.