Claude Lefort: Elements for a Political Biography

Abstract

I should note from the outset that Claude Lefort would never have endorsed the title given to this chapter.¹ A political biography rather than a philosophical analysis is a paradoxical way to keep alive one of the most significant political thinkers in post-war France who shied away from the lure and allure of popularity. While many well-known French thinkers since the 1980s have collaborated with younger intellectuals to produce autobiographies on the basis of informal “entretiens,” Lefort turned down several requests to lend himself to this kind of popular simplification of his thought. Politics was central to Lefort’s life and to his thought; indeed, he would refuse to accept their separation, as if one could think without acting or act without thinking. There is a further reason that Lefort would not approve of the idea of a political biography. As he indicated in the title to his study of Machiavelli, to understand the working of political thought it is necessary also to analyze how that work continues to work among new generations.²