© Columbia University Press
Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy
May, 2007
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13300-5
$40.00
/ £27.50
"Anyone with any interest in understanding the rise and fall of communism in the 20th century will find this book immensely stimulating." — Paul Anderson, Tribune Magazine
"A work of extreme lucidity that eludes academic fashion or disciplinary classification. " — Constantin Iordachi, Slavic ReviewCentral European University, Budapest, Hungary
"An important book that forces us to rethink a fundamental question of the twentieth century" — Martin Dimitrov, Journal of Cold War Stars
"The so-called triumph of capitalism that accompanied the real collapse of communism in 1989 has led Americans to 'bury communism'—and forget it. But in Europe and especially France, the attempt to understand and explain both the 'totalitarian temptation' that drew so many around the world to communism's 'promise' as well as the abrupt collapse of a system thought to be deeply entrenched has engendered vigorous debate. In Complications, Claude Lefort takes on his great compatriots Francois Furet and Martin Malia, arguing that Communism was not an ideology based on a seductive illusion or liberal myth (the Party will free you from the State), but a complex product of modernity itself. He does not wish to excuse Communism, but to complicate its meanings and, in the tradition of Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt, to show that its perniciousness was built into a European radical revolutionary project that began with the French Revolution and whose dangers should have been apparent from the outset. For those who think history is not over and that communism's remarkable worldly successes and its abject collapse demand understanding, this book is indispensable. You need not agree with Lefort (I don't) to appreciate the way in which he clarifies the central questions of Communism's relationship to radical liberalism, on the one side, and totalitarianism, on the other." — Benjamin R. Barber, Distinguished Senior Fellow, DEMOS Kekst Professor, University of Maryland
"Claude Lefort is to French political philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century what Maurice Blanchot was to its literature: a hidden but decisive master. I belong to those who owe him a great debt in this regard. Lefort is first of all the most lucid and most penetrating analyst of totalitarianism, and Complications is a remarkable synthesis of his approach to the subject. But this heir of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was always and equally a great citizen, his lucidity never leading to either apathy or cynicism. The analysis of totalitarianism and the demand for a more active democracy have always been bound up indissolubly in his life and thought." — Pierre Rosanvallon, author of Democracy Past and Future