Introduction to Lefort

The following essay stands at a double intersection in the work of Claude Lefort: its political thrust is determined by his activities in the group “Socialisme ou Barbarie,” while the theoretical lessons drawn from that experience return to a series of earlier theoretical studies and point toward the direction that his thought has taken since then. The volume from which this essay is taken, Elements d'une théorie de la bureaucratic (Droz: 1971), contains texts which for the most part are explicitly political; the majority of them appeared in Socialisme ou Barbarie or Les Temps Modernes between 1949 and 1958. To call one element of Lefort's work “political” and another “theoretical” is to draw a dichotomy which, in effect, Lefort would not reject.