THE POLITICS OF CLAUDE
LEFORT’S POLITICAL:
BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND
RADICAL DEMOCRACY1

ABSTRACT Claude Lefort’s rethinking of ‘the political’ has been highly fruitful for political theory, yet its politics remain unclear. It has inspired transforma- tive, radical-democratic projects, but has also served as a basis for more liberal conceptions. This article explores the sources and implications of this ambigu- ity by setting Lefort’s work against the backdrop of the anti-totalitarian moment in French political thought and the trajectories of two of his students, Miguel Abensour and Marcel Gauchet. It emerges that although Lefort’s democratic theory cannot be reduced to a defensive liberalism, neither is it as expansive as some might hope.

Claude Lefort is often credited with launching the ‘return of political philosophy’ in France, yet the political valence of his thinking, like that of this return, is by no means self-evident. Indeed, Lefort’s contribution to politi- cal theory, like the broader movement of which it was a part, may be construed in two opposite ways. On the one hand, Lefort’s work has been highly fruitful for radical-democratic, post-Marxist and deconstructive politi- cal theory. His theorization of ‘the political’ as a symbolic order, and modern democracy as constituted by ‘an empty space of power’, are rightly cele- brated as central contributions to an open-ended, post-foundational, radi- cally democratic political theory (e.g. Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, 1997 [1981)). On the other hand, his work can be read as

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications andThesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068774

participating in the attack on radical politics that led the French intellectual left on its deflationary course from May ’68 to a depoliticized ‘republic of the centre’. By decisively rejecting Marxism, underlining the dangers of revol- ution, and depicting democracy first and foremost in contrast to totali- tarianism, Lefort helped pioneer a generational shift away from the radical, transformative tradition and toward reconciliation with ‘normal’ liberal- constitutional politics. Lefort’s ideas, then, can be associated with radicaliza- tion or restoration, the deepening or limiting of democracy, awakening from an old ideological slumber or falling into a new one.2 It is this ambiguity – the ‘politics’ of Lefort’s ‘political’ – that I seek to explore here.

I interrogate Lefort’s rethinking of the political in light of a central division in contemporary political theory, a division that splits the hyphen in liberal-democratic thinking. Though often assumed to go together, liber- alism and democracy are distinct, at times antagonistic, principles (Geuss, 2001; Mouffe, 2000). Democracy designates a form of rule: rule by the people. Liberalism does not; there is no ‘liberocracy’. Liberalism is a theory and practice oflimiting rule for the sake of individual freedom. There can be illiberal democracy (the classical polis) and anti-democratic liberalism (constitutional monarchy), though today of course the preference is for a hybrid, with popular sovereignty checked by the rule of law, individual and minority rights, a division of powers and so on. Nevertheless, the fissure between liberal and radical democracy, central to the politics of 19th-century Europe, has re-opened in recent years on the academic left. Today’s liberals and radical democrats agree broadly on aims: they favour a more equitable distribution of rights, resources and power. Yet how they envision these aims, and especially the theoretical and political means of pursing them, can differ profoundly. On one side, (left) liberals emphasize principles, laws and institutions that would produce just outcomes, understood in terms of rights and entitlements. On the other, radical democrats emphasize the politics that would lead to a more just society, understood in terms of power and partici- pation. To radical democrats, liberals can seem conservative, moralistic, ratio- nalistic and indifferent to politics; to liberals, radical democrats can seem reckless, amoral, antirational and indifferent to normative questions.3At stake in this debate is at once the nature of democracy, what it is and can become, and the task of political theory, how it can promote freedom and equality.

A liberal/radical democratic frame not only helps locate Lefort’s politics in contemporary debates, it also helps situate him in his historical context. For with the evaporation of Marxism, this opposition became one of the key ideological axes within Lefort’s milieu. As we will see, however, even within this context he cuts an ambiguous figure. I therefore propose to explore the implications of his thought as they were elaborated in the work of two of his most accomplished students, Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour. While both started from a position very near Lefort’s around 1970 – a non- Marxist, libertarian4 leftism – Gauchet embarked on a journey from anarchism

to liberalism to republicanism, while Abensour remained closer to the spirit of the 1960s, moving toward radical democracy. What is remarkable about these contrasting careers is that both were decisively shaped by Lefort; in their work we see in a sense the realization of two possibilities latent in his thinking. After laying out the central features of Lefort’s rethinking of demo- cratic politics in the first part of this article, I explore these different possi- bilities in the second. In the third part I use them to sharpen the contours of Lefort’s own position. Although the bases of a sophisticated form of radical democratic thinking can be found in Lefort’s theory, I conclude that elabor- ating it may require a radical rethinking of his notion of ‘the political’.

A point of entry into Lefort’s distinctive thinking of the political can be had via two common understandings of politics, one typically associated with liberal, the other with radical-democratic theory. The first views politics in terms of the common good and the proper constitution of the community. This understanding underlies the main current of political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Rawls, with its focus on ‘constitutional essentials’ and its search for a just and stable order. This view is holistic and normative, and implies a perspective on society that is at once external and from the top, as reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary’s principal definition of politics: the ‘science and art of government; the science dealing with the form, organization, and administration of a state or part of one’ – or, at a more theoretical level: ‘that branch of moral philosophy dealing with the state or social organism as a whole’. The second understanding conceives of politics in terms of power, as competition for rule and resources and the jockeying of different interests and ideologies. This view, which theOED notes is generally ‘unfavourable’, is classically expressed in Harold Lasswell’s formula: ‘who gets what, where and how’. It has another genealogy, stretch- ing from Machiavelli to Marx to Weber to Foucault, whose emphasis on power and conflict tends to be shared by today’s radical democrats. Of course, most reflections on politics try to strike a balance between the two notions, between the whole and the parts, idealism and realism. Lefort’s is no exception. What sets him apart is his way of doing so.

Lefort’s theoretical innovations are based in his understanding of politics as a symbolic domain. This is the root of his particular way of char- acterizing the relation between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘the political’ (le

tician or statesman). ‘Politics’ (la politique), by contrast, usually corresponds to the second, conflictual understanding. Lefort does not disagree, defining ‘politics’ as competition for public power and decisions about its use. His