Complications

`Complications’ ties together the central concerns of Lefort’s work over the last half-century. A pivotal figure in French thought, Lefort studied under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, cofounded with Cornelius Castoriadis the influential journal `Socialisme ou Barbarie’, and famously engaged in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the Soviet Union and communist parties in the West. He has influenced generations of political thinkers and throughout his career has offered a vital leftist, noncommunist critique of both liberalism and communism. In showing that the question of communism remains central to our time, Lefort engages and challenges the work of prominent historians Martin Malia and François Furet. He shows how their emphasis on “illusion” and ideology fails to understand either the logic and workings of the Communist Party and its impact on Soviet society or why so many in the West had communist sympathies. Lefort contends that communism must be seen as part of a larger history of modernity since the Enlightenment. In the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron, he complicates the pieties of historical understanding and offers a new approach to thinking about totalitarianism and a more vital democracy.