Complications : communism and the dilemmas of democracy
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Complications : communism and the dilemmas of democracy
（Columbia studies in political thought/political history / Dick Howard, general editor）
Columbia University Press, c2007
- : cloth
- Other Title
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La complication : retour sur le communisme
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Note
"First published in France in 1999 as La complication : retour sur le communisme"--P. 3
Includes bibliographical references and index
HTTP:URL=http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip075/2006036788.html Information=Table of contents only
Description and Table of Contents
Description
"Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy" ties together the central concerns of the work of Claude Lefort over the past half-century. A pivotal figure in French thought, Lefort studied under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, cofounded with Cornelius Castoriadis the influential journal "Socialisme ou Barbarie", and famously engaged in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the Soviet Union and Communist parties in the West. He has influenced generations of political thinkers and throughout his career has offered invaluable leftist, non-communist critiques of both liberalism and Communism.It is the prevailing belief that the death of communism was a victory for liberal democracy. In "Complications", however, Lefort challenges this interpretation and provides new ways of understanding the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist phenomenon. Lefort engages the work of prominent historians Martin Malia and Francois Furet and shows how their emphasis on 'illusion' and ideology led to their failure to understand the logic and workings of the Communist Party, and its impact on Soviet society, and the reasons why so many in the West had Communist sympathies.He also maintains that those who regard the end of Communism as the triumph of markets and 'freedom' restrict the scope of democratic thought and the possibility of greater social equality.
Lefort contends that Communism must be seen as part of a larger history of modernity and believes that the diagnosis of its death is dangerous to the future of democracy. In the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron, Lefort complicates the pieties of historical understanding and offers a new approach to thinking about totalitarianism and a more vital democracy.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Dick Howard Acknowledgments Translator's Introduction by Julian Bourg Author's Introduction 1. Wisdom of the Historian 2. Critique of "Couch Liberalism" 3. Autopsy of an Illusion 4. Marx's False Paternity 5. The Idea of Revolution and the Revolutionary Phenomenon 6. The Jacobin Phantom 7. A Liberal Matrix for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? 8. Democracy and Totalitarianism 9. The Myth of the Soviet Union in the West 10. The French Communist Party After World War II 11. Utopia and Tragedy 12. The Political and the Social 13. An Intentional Movement 14. The Party Above All 15. Disincorporation and Reincorporation of Power 16. Hannah Arendt on the Law of Movement and Ideology 17. The Perversion of the Law 18. The Fabrication of the Social 19. Voluntary Servitude 20. Impossible Reform 21. Planning and Social Division 22. Psychologism and Moralism at Fault 23. Communism and the Constitution of the World-Space Notes Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
