Claude Lefort-Date biografice-

Claude Lefort(French:[lf]; 21 April 1924 inParis[1] 3 October 2010 in Paris[2]

HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lefort" \l "cite_note-3" [3]) was a French philosopher and activist.

He was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, thephenomenologistMaurice Merleau-Ponty[4](whose posthumous publications Lefort later edited[5]). By 1943 he was organising a faction of theTrotskyistParti Communiste Internationalisteat theLyce Henri IVinParis.

Lefort was impressed byCornelius Castoriadiswhen he first met him. From 1946 he collaborated with him in the ChaulieuMontal Tendency, so called from their pseudonymsPierre Chaulieu(Castoriadis) andClaude Montal(Lefort). They publishedOn the Regime and Against the Defence of the USSR, a critique of both theSoviet Unionand its Trotskyist supporters. They suggested that theUSSRwas 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 thelibertarian socialistgroupSocialisme ou Barbarie. Lefort's textL'Exprience proltariennewas important in shifting the group's focus towards forms of self-organisation.

For a time Lefort wrote for both the Socialisme ou Barbarie journal and forLes Temps Modernes.[6]His involvement in the latter journal ended after a published debate during 19524 overSartre's articleThe Communists and Peace.

Lefort was for a long time uncomfortable with Socialisme ou Barbarie's "organisationalist" tendencies. In 1958 he, Henri Simon and others left and formedInformations et Liaison Ouvrires.

In his academic career, Lefort taught at theUniversity of So Paulo, at theSorbonneand at thecole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, being affiliated to theCentre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron.[7]He has written on the early political writersNiccol Machiavelliandtienne de La Botieand explored "the Totalitarian enterprise" in its "denial of social division... [and] of the difference between the order of power, the order of law and the order of knowledge"Biography

Lefort became a marxist in his youth under the influence of his teacher,Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From 1944, he belonged to the small French Trotskyite. In 1946, he met Cornelius Castoriadis who came to Paris from Greece. Right away, they formed a faction in the Trotskist party called "Chaulieu (Castoriadis) Montal (Lefort)", that left the party and became the Socialist or Barbarist Group who, in 1949, started a journal with this name.

Socialism or Barbarismconsidered the USSR to be an example of state capitalism and gave its support to anti-bureaucratic revolts in Eastern Europe - especially the uprising in Budapest in 1956. Differences of opinion brought about a schism within Socialism or Barbarism, and Lefort sided with Henri Simon, one of the founders of "Informations et liasions ouvrires" (Workers News and Affairs) in 1958. A few years later he ceased his militant activism.

After having worked amongst other places, in 1947 and 1948 for UNESCO, in 1949 Lefort passed the aggregation in philosophy: he taught at the high school in Nmes (1950) and in Reims (1951). In 1951, he was recruited as a sociology assistant at The Sorbonne by Georges Gurvitch. In the year 1952 (following a dispute with Gurvitch), he was detached from the sociology section of the CNRS, until 1966, with a break of two years (19531954), when he was professor of philosophy at University of So Paulo (Brazil). As for the CNRS, the support of Raymond Aron led to his recruitment as a teacher of sociology at the University of Caen, where he worked from 1966 to 1971, the year when he defended as his doctoral thesis his book on Machiavelli, The Labour of Work. That same year, he was again hired as a researcher in the sociology section of the CNRS until 1976, when he joined the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where he stayed until his retirement in 1989.

The intellectual work of Lefort is strongly tied to his participation, often tension filled, in successive journals. WithLes Temps Modernes(Modern Times) introduced by M. Merleau Ponty he took part in the "gatherings of collaborators" and wrote from 1945 until his debate with J.P. Sartre in 1953. In Socialism or Barbarism (which lasted from 1949 to 1967 and of which he was the co-founder), he was active until 1950, then from 1955 to 1958. He was involved in Texture (born in 1969) from 1971 to the end (1975) and there he brought in Castoriadis and Miguel Abensour. With them (as well as Pierre Clastres and Marcel Gauchet) he created Libre in 1977, which was published up until 1980, when there were some disagreements with Castoriadis as well as with Gauchet. From 1982 to 1984, he led Passe-Present where amongst others Miguel Abensour, Carlos Semprun, Claude Mouchard andfr: Pierre Pachetparticipated. These last two as well as Claude Habib formed the reading committee of the Littrature et Politique that Lefort founded for the publisher ditions Belin in 1987.

No doubt he assigned less importance to the research centers at which he had participated in EHESS: the CECMAS (center of the study of mass communication), founded by Georges Friedman and which welcomed Edgar Morin, then the Centre Aron, which he frequented just before his death.

When M. Merleau-Ponty died in 1961, Lefort took charge of the edition of his manuscripts. In the 1970s, he developed an analysis of bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe. He read The Gulag Archipelago and published a book on Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His main ideas on Stalinist totalitarianism were published in 1981 in a collection titledL'Invention dmocratique.