Claude Lefort

Claude Lefort (; French: [ləfɔʁ]; 21 April 1924 – 3 October 2010) was a French philosopher and activist. He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (whose posthumous publications Lefort later edited). In 1944, he joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste. Lefort was impressed by Cornelius Castoriadis when he first met him. From 1946, he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu–Montal Tendency, so called after their pseudonyms "Pierre Chaulieu" (Castoriadis) and "Claude Montal" (Lefort). In August 1946, they published "On the Regime and Against the Defense of the USSR", a critique of both Stalinism and the Trotskyist degenerated workers' state theory. They suggested that the USSR was dominated by a social layer of bureaucrats, and that it consisted of a new kind of society as aggressive as Western European societies. By 1948, having tried to persuade other Trotskyists of their viewpoint, they broke away with about a dozen others and founded the libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort's text "L'Expérience prolétarienne" (1952) was important in shifting the group's focus towards forms of self-organization. For a time, Lefort wrote for both the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and for Les Temps Modernes. His involvement in the latter journal ended after a published debate during 1952–54 over Jean-Paul Sartre's article The Communists and Peace. Lefort was for a long time uncomfortable with Socialisme ou Barbarie's "organizationalist" tendencies. In 1958, he, Henri Simon and others left Socialisme ou Barbarie and formed the group Information et Liaisons Ouvrières. In his academic career, Lefort taught at the University of São Paulo, at the Sorbonne and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), being affiliated to the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. He has written on the early modern political writers Niccolò Machiavelli and...