Download or read book The Philosophy of Claude Lefort written by Bernard Flynn and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Claude Lefort offers an account of Lefort's accomplishment - its unique merits, its relation to political philosophy within the Continental tradition, and its great relevance today.
Download or read book The Political Forms of Modern Society written by Claude Lefort and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1986-08-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today. The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work.
Download or read book Writing the Political Test written by Claude Lefort and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the preeminient political philosophers of the 20th century makes a compelling argument for the political cogency of literary writing in this book which among to his intellectual autobiography and an introduction to his work.
Download or read book Complications written by Claude Lefort and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracyties 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.
Download or read book Claude Lefort written by M. Plot and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first English language volume to offer such a wide-ranging scholarly and intellectual perspective on Claude Lefort. It constitutes the most comprehensive attempt to reconstruct Lefort's engagement with his theoretical interlocutors as well as his influence on today's democratic thought and contemporary continental political philosophy.
Download or read book Thinking Radical Democracy written by Martin Breaugh and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour. The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding equality and emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More.
Download or read book Machiavelli in the Making written by Claude Lefort and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Machiavelli in the Making, the influential French scholar and public intellectual Claude Lefort introduces a wholly novel interpretation of Niccoló Machiavelli's oeuvre, revealing in the Florentine's thought a thoroughly modern concept of the political with implications for "our experience of politics here and now." Lefort extricates Machiavelli's thought from the dominant interpretations of Machiavelli as the founder of "objective" political science, which, having liberated itself from the religious and moralizing tendencies of medieval political reflection, attempts to arrive at a realistic discourse on the operations of raw power. Lefort ultimately finds that Machiavelli's discourse opens the "place of the political," which had previously been occupied by theology and morality. An essential contribution to the ongoing reassessment of Machiavelli's significance, Machiavelli in the Making also stands as a crucial text for the understanding of Lefort's later writings on democracy and totallitarianism.
Download or read book Democracy and Political Theory written by Claude Lefort and published by Polity. This book was released on 1991-01-08 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the central questions of democracy and politics in modern societies. Through an analysis of some of the key texts of 19th and 20th century thought - from Marx, Michelet and de Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt - the author explores the ambiguities of democracy, the nature of human rights, the idea and the reality of revolution, the emergence of totalitarianism and the changing relations between politics, religion and the image of the body. While developing a highly original account of the nature of politics and power in modern societies, he links political reflection to the interpretation of history as an open, indeterminate process of which we are part. This work should interest specialists in social and political theory and philosophers.
Download or read book Post Foundational Political Thought written by Oliver Marchart and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging overview of the emergence of post-foundationalism and a survey of the work of its key contemporary exponents.This book presents the first systematic coverage of the conceptual difference between 'politics' (the practice of conventional politics: the political system or political forms of action) and 'the political' (a much more radical aspect which cannot be restricted to the realms of institutional politics). It is also the first introductory overview of post-foundationalism and the tradition of 'left Heideggerianism': the political thought of contemporary theorists who make frequent use of the idea of political difference: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau. After an overview of current trends in social post-foundationalism and a genealogical chapter on the historical emergence of the difference between the concepts of 'politics' and 'the political', the work of individual theorists is presented and discussed at length. Individual chapters are presented
Download or read book The Prose of the World written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call The Prose of the World, or Introduction to the Prose of the World, was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.
Download or read book A Companion to Continental Philosophy written by Simon Critchley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1998-06-08 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the complete development of post-Kantian Continental philosophy, this volume serves as an essential reference work for philosophers and those engaged in the many disciplines that are integrally related to Continental and European Philosophy.
Download or read book Claude Lefort s Political Philosophy written by Mattia Di Pierro and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a new interpretation of Claude Lefort’s thought focusing on his phenomenological method. Although all scholars recognize the influence of Merleau-Ponty, so far no one has demonstrated the fundamental coherence between Merleau-Ponty’s theory and the main concepts proposed by Lefort; in particular between the concept of institution and the definitions of social and democracy. If Merleau-Ponty uses the idea of institution to think beyond the division between subject and object, to think together continuity and difference, permanence and change, this same concept allows Lefort to understand society as both conflict and unity. From this starting point, this study will attempt to clarify Lefort’s concept of the political and his interpretations of modernity, humanism, and the work of Niccolò Machiavelli. These very concepts will show the difference from structuralism, Michel Foucault’s contemporary theory and theories of immanence. At the same time this study highlights an internal tension in Lefort’s own thinking: between autonomy and experience, institution and insurgence.
Download or read book Institution and Passivity written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and published by . This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institution and Passivity is based on course notes for classes taught at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. Philosophically, this collection connects the issue of passive constitution of meaning with the dimension of history, furthering discussions and completing arguments started in The Visible and the Invisible and Signs (both published by Northwestern). Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey’s translation makes available to an English-speaking readership a critical transitional text in the history of phenomenology.
Download or read book Democracy to Come written by Fred Dallmayr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Fred Dallmayr lays the groundwork for a new understanding of democracy. He argues that democracy is not a stable system anchored in a manifest authority (like monarchy), but is sustained by the recessed and purely potential rule of the "people". Hence, democracy has to constantly reinvent itself, resembling theologically a creatio continua. Like one of Calder's mobiles, democracy for him involves three basic elements that must be balanced constantly: the people, political leaders, and policy goals. Where this balance is disrupted, democracy derails into populism, Bonapartism, or messianism. Given this need for balance, democratic politics is basically a "relational praxis." In our globalizing age, democracy cannot be confined domestically. Dallmayr rejects the idea that it can be autocratically imposed abroad through forced regime change, or that the dominant Western model can simply be transferred elsewhere. In this respect, he challenges the equation of democracy with the pursuit of individual or collective self-interest, insisting that other, more ethical conceptions are possible and that different societies should nurture democracy with their own cultural resources. Providing examples, he discusses efforts to build democracy in the Middle East, China, and India (respectively with Islamic, Confucian and Hindu resources). In the end, Dallmayr's hope is for a "democracy to come", that is, a cosmopolitan community governed not by hegemonic force but by the spirit of equality and mutual respect.
Download or read book Adventures of the Symbolic written by Warren Breckman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warren Breckman critically revisits thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism.
Download or read book The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy written by Pedro T. Magalhães and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By re-examining the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, this book offers a reflection on the nature of modern democracy and the question of its legitimacy. Pedro T. Magalhães shows that present-day elitist, populist and pluralist accounts of democracy owe, in diverse and often complicated ways, an intellectual debt to the interwar era, German-speaking, scholarly and political controversies on the problem(s) of modern democracy. A discussion of Weber’s ambivalent diagnosis of modernity and his elitist views on democracy, as they were elaborated especially in the 1910s, sets the groundwork for the study. Against that backdrop, Schmitt’s interwar political thought is interpreted as a form of neo-authoritarian populism, whereas Kelsen evinces robust, though not entirely unproblematic, pluralist consequences. In the conclusion, the author draws on Claude Lefort’s concept of indeterminacy to sketch a potentially more fruitful way than can be gleaned from the interwar German discussions of conceiving the nexus between the elitist, populist and pluralist faces of modern democracy. The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy will be of interest to political theorists, political philosophers, intellectual historians, theoretically oriented political scientists, and legal scholars working in the subfields of constitutional law and legal theory. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315157566, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Download or read book Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of Democratic Politics written by Natalie J. Doyle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents, for the first time in the English language, Marcel Gauchet’s interpretation of the challenges faced by contemporary Western societies as a result of the crisis of liberal democratic politics and the growing influence of populism. Responding to Gauchet’s analysis, international experts explore the depoliticising aspects of contemporary democratic culture that explain the appeal of populism: neo-liberal individualism, the cult of the individual and its related human rights, and the juridification of all human relationships. The book also provides the intellectual context within which Gauchet’s understanding of modern society has developed—in particular, his critical engagement with Marxism and the profound influence of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort on his work. It highlights the way Gauchet’s work remains faithful to an understanding of history that stresses the role of humanity as a collective subject, while also seeking to account for both the historical novelty of contemporary individualism and the new form of alienation that radical modernity engenders. In doing so, the book also opens up new avenues for reflection on the political significance of the contemporary health crisis. Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of Democratic Politics will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduate students of social and political thought, political anthropology and sociology, political philosophy, and political theory.
