Abstract
Let me begin by noting that Claude Lefort would never have endorsed the title given to this chapter. The idea that the strictly political aspects of his life and work could be separated from the philosophical, professorial, and private richness of his life would have been abhorrent to him. From his earliest work, Lefort fundamentally challenged the positivist conception of a society seen as if from above, composed of distinct and autonomous spheres—of economic, legal, theoretical, and aesthetic authority—which are recombined in different ways by different political regimes. For the same reason, he did not consider his own life on this positivist model of separable fields of existence, as if there were only an external and accidental relation between his social, political, and cultural life. A student of Merleau-Ponty, Lefort remained a phenomenologist, whether he was writing on working-class politics, Soviet totalitarianism, or French or Renaissance history, and above all when he tried to understand the radical nature of democracy and of the democratic project.
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