8. Bureaucratic Society and Traditional Rationality: Claude Lefort

As was shown in Chap. 5, the earlier work of Jürgen Habermas tried to avoid this reproach. I will return to the further development of his version of critical theory in the ‘Afterword’ to this volume. I take the liberty of adding to this note a reference to a recent article that I wrote on Habermas as himself an engaged political thinker under the title ‘Citizen Habermas’, in Constellations, November 2015. https://​onlinelibrary.​wiley.​com/​doi/​pdf/​10.​1111/​1467-8675.​12190

On the group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, see also the discussion in Chap. 9 of Cornelius Castoriadis. It would demand a separate monograph to trace the nuances of the group’s history or to try to separate the contributions of the individual members. By treating Lefort and Castoriadis separately, I hope to make clear both what unites them and at least the basis, if not the substantial details, of their differences. (The third member of the group to become a well-known critical philosopher in the 1970s was Jean-François Lyotard, a friend to whom I am also indebted, whose later work on the post-modern and the end of ‘grand narratives’ falls outside the scope of this present work.)

On the quarrel, cf. Sartre’s ‘Merleau-Ponty’, published in the commemorative issue of Les Temps Modernes and reprinted in Situations IV (especially pp. 257ff.). It is hard to avoid adding in reference to this article that Sartre seems never to have understood the radical novelty of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. His continual categorization of Merleau-Ponty as expressing a longing for the primal happiness he lived in his youth may be interesting psychology, but it explains little about Merleau-Ponty’s work, although perhaps much about Sartre!

‘Entretien avec C. Lefort’, in l’Anti-Mythes, No. 14, p. 10. (The interview dates from April 19, 1975, and is now translated in Telos No. 30, Winter, 1977. The l’Anti-Mythes has also published interviews with P. Clastres, Henri Simon, and C. Castoriadis, the latter having been translated in Telos No. 23, Spring 1975.) The animating spirit of the l’Anti-Mythes seems to have Lefort’s student, Marcel Gauchet, who later broke violently with his teacher. Gauchet became the co-editor of the journal Le Débat, a central organ of the French intellectual center-left.

Ibid., pp. 12–13.

Ibid., p. 27.

This argument is developed particularly in ‘Le prolétariat et sa direction’ and ‘L’expérience prolétarienne’, both of which are reprinted in Eléments d’une Theorie de la bureaucratie (Droz, 1971). In the latter article, Lefort develops a methodology for the sociological analysis of what the experience, and hence the consciousness, of the proletariat in fact is, how it changes, and why it can be so volatile.

The term will be defined more precisely below. It might be noted that this definition of the specificity of the social against Sartre’s idealism points to the importance of recognizing that the properly sociological deals with ‘2 plus n persons’ (as opposed to Sartre’s existential individualism).

In Eléments d’une Theorie de la bureaucratie (hereafter Eléments), op. cit., p. 65.

For example, Les Temps Modernes’ support for Gomulka as the only choice in the post-1956 situation in Poland, even though he clearly was not helping to extend—quite the contrary, he sought to normalize—the movement that brought him to power. At least by saving the party, and acting cautiously to prevent another Russian invasion, he appeared to the ‘progressive intellectuals’ to be giving History another chance. Similarly, Lefort shows that the application of this same ‘method’ transforms Sartre’s apparently critical ‘The Ghost of Stalin’ into a superficial critique that denounces and sees a series of errors and contingencies at the root of Russian political behavior rather than analyzes the foundations of Stalinism.

Aside from some nasty polemical remarks, Sartre’s major criticism of Lefort is that he denies mediation, seeing the proletariat in a crypto-Hegelian fashion. Sartre sees Lefort’s notion of the accumulation of proletarian experience as built on the representation of an evolution from seed to flower to fruit. Lefort’s proletariat is said to be modeled on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or Marivaux’s Marianne: it earns its education through adversity. Sartre portrays Lefort’s attitude as one of the pure intellectual consciousness standing outside the fray because he insists that the Stalinism must be accounted for through an analysis of the actual experience of the class. Sartre’s criticism points to a real problem in Lefort’s position, although he neglects its nuances for his polemical purposes. Lefort has seen the problems with his understanding of the proletariat, although not by making apologies to Sartre. On the other hand, Lefort’s attack on Sartre remains valid despite the modifications that Sartre’s politics have undergone since then. Lefort is correct in pointing out that, although it stresses ambiguity, the Sartrean ambiguity is always for consciousness, subjective; as a result, it can be cleared up once one chooses the path of History. For Lefort, Sartre thus leaves behind Hegel, returning back to Kant: ‘Where the best of Hegel is in his attempt to describe the becoming of Spirit, to show how activity develops within passivity itself, you [i.e., Sartre] reintroduce the abstraction of moral consciousness—not the least sure of itself, certainly, nor clear to itself, but transcendent in relation to all its determinations, pure activity permitting neither deliberation nor critique inasmuch as it coincides with its project of revolution’ (in Éléments, p. 92). And, continues Lefort: ‘That the proletariat is already a class at the level of the production process, but not in the least a completed synthesis, that there is a dialectic but not a finalism, that the activity of the vanguard organizations must be put within the dynamic of the whole [ensemble] while this does not in the least mean that there is an undifferentiated totality nor a miraculous spontaneity—it is clear that all this, which upsets the relation subject-object is for you a “magical thought”’ (ibid., p. 100). In effect, for Lefort, Sartre’s position is nothing but a ‘social’ exemplification of the dialectic of Self and Other; forgetting that already Being and Nothingness showed that such a dialectic, even in the example of love, turns out to be antagonistic.

Lefort also appeals critically to the notion of a ‘basic personality’ presented by the cultural psychoanalysis of Abram Kardiner. C.f., his ‘Notes critiques sur les méthodes de Kardiner’, in Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, No. 10, 1951, and the ‘Introduction à l’oeuvre d’Abram Kardiner’, in the French translation of L’individu dans sa société (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). (The essay is reprinted in op. cit., pp. 80–111.)

I will return later to Lefort’s use of Freud, mediated in part by Jacques Lacan, when I discuss his notion of the imaginaire of a society. Lefort does not believe that concepts can be carried over from one domain of explanation to another, nor does he believe in an applied psychoanalysis. However, the experience confronted in the psychoanalytic cure and its meta-psychological reflection show parallels to the problematic Lefort is confronting. In the previously cited Interview with the l’Anti-Mythes, he notes that ‘whether it is a question of the critique of the myth of revolution, of the myth of the ‘good society’, of the critique of the contradictions of power, the idea of social division as the original division and hence of the permanence of conflict, of the idea that societies order themselves as a function of the demand for and the impossibility of thinking their origins, or again of the idea that the discourse which a society maintains about itself is constitutive of its institution, or of the relation that I attempt to establish between the figures of knowledge and power—in all these cases, the borrowing from Freud is felt’ (op. cit., p. 27).

Later, Lefort will identify the emergence of History with that of a Power, the political, separated from the society and claiming to incarnate its unity. He will return to this question from the point of view of the anthropological work of Pierre Clastres, La société contre l’état (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

‘Rapport de Recherches’, p. 16. This essay was submitted to the CNRS, Lefort’s employer, as part of the dossier for his yearly evaluation. It has not been published.

‘Capitalisme et religion au XVIe Siècle’, in Les Temps Modernes, 78 (1952). I am again citing from an offprint, following the above procedure; this time, however, the publication data were on the offprint! (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 112–126).

‘L’aliénation comme concept sociologique’, p. 50. Again, I am citing from an offprint and have not got the publication data. The article dates from 1956. Citations in the text follow the above pattern (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 49–68).

Citation is from ‘Réalité sociale et histoire’, p. 68. This is the mimeographed version of the student notes, usually reread and corrected by the professor, and for sale in a bookstore near the Sorbonne. Lefort was asked to give these lectures by Raymond Aron, who was on leave. Lefort was planning to revise these lectures for eventual book publication; instead, the essential thrust of the course is found in ‘Marx: d’une vision de l’histoire à l’autre’, op. cit., pp. 195–233.

‘Notes sociologiques sur Machiavel et Marx: La politique et le réel’, p. 116. Once again, I cite from an offprint—but found the data: Cahiers internationaux de sociologié. Vol. 28, nouvelle série, 7e année, janvier-juin, 1960. References in the text follow the usual format (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 169–194).

Lefort points out in ‘La naissance de l’idéologie et l’humanisme, Introduction’ (Textures, 73/6–7, pp. 27–68), that Marx and his followers tended to neglect this fundamental insight when they reduce ideology to a simple masking of the real. Such an argument supposes that it is possible to know the real in itself—for example, that the real basis of Roman society was its system of production (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 234–277).

The term is taken from the title of a review of Lefort’s Machiavel by Marcel Gauchet (in Critique, No. 329, Oct 1974). The suggestion of such a logic, however, is already contained in the article we are discussing.

In Textures, 71/2–3, pp. 7–79, and Machiavel: Le travail de Toeuvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

‘Esquisse d’une genèse de l’idéologie dans les sociétés modernes’, in Textures, 74/8–9, pp. 3–54. A slightly revised version appears in the Encyclopedia Universalis (Organon) under the title ‘L’ère de l’idéologie’ (now reprinted in op. cit., pp. 278–329). A further elaboration of these themes is found in Lefort’s ‘Le nom de l’Un’, in E. de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: Payot, 1976).

‘La naissance’, op. cit., p. 48.

‘Esquisse’, op. cit., p. 31.

Ibid., p. 36.

Lefort’s recent study of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Un homme en trop (Paris: Seuil, 1976) elaborates this theory brilliantly.

‘Rapport de Recherches’, op. cit., p. 12.

‘La politique et la pensée de la politique’, op. cit., p. 69.