Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy

Claude Lefort

Share |

May, 2007
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13300-5
$40.00 / £27.50

Foreword by Dick Howard

Acknowledgments

Translator's Introduction by Julian Bourg

Author's Introduction

1. Wisdom of the Historian

2. Critique of "Couch Liberalism"

3. Autopsy of an Illusion

4. Marx's False Paternity

5. The Idea of Revolution and the Revolutionary Phenomenon

6. The Jacobin Phantom

7. A Liberal Matrix for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat?

8. Democracy and Totalitarianism

9. The Myth of the Soviet Union in the West

10. The French Communist Party After World War II

11. Utopia and Tragedy

12. The Political and the Social

13. An Intentional Movement

14. The Party Above All

15. Disincorporation and Reincorporation of Power

16. Hannah Arendt on the Law of Movement and Ideology

17. The Perversion of the Law

18. The Fabrication of the Social

19. Voluntary Servitude

20. Impossible Reform

21. Planning and Social Division

22. Psychologism and Moralism at Fault

23. Communism and the Constitution of the World-Space

Notes

Index

Related Subjects

• Political Philosophy

Series

• Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History

About the Author

Claude Lefort is the director of studies emeritus at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales. He is the author of Writing: The Political Test, Democracy and Political Theory, and Political Forms of Modern Society, among other works.

Julian Bourg is assistant professor of history at Bucknell University. He is the editor of After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France and the author of From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought.

Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Among his books are The Marxian Legacy (2nd ed.), The Birth of American Political Thought, From Marx to Kant (2nd ed.), and Political Judgments.Claude Lefort is the Director of Studies Emeritus in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales and a leading political philosopher in France. He is the author of many works including Democracy and Political Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and The Political Forms of Modern Society (MIT Press, 1986). Julian Bourg (Ph.D, University of California, Berkeley, 2001) is assistant professor of history at Bucknell University.

top of page