The Philosophy of Claude Lefort

The Philosophy of Claude Lefort PDF Author: Bernard Flynn
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810121069
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
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.

The Philosophy of Claude Lefort

The Philosophy of Claude Lefort PDF Author: Bernard Flynn
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810121069
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Philosophy of Claude Lefort

The Philosophy of Claude Lefort PDF Author: Bernard Flynn
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810121058
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the beginning the French philosopher Claude Lefort has set himself the task of interpreting the political life of modern society-and over time he has succeeded in elaborating a distinctive conception of modern democracy that is linked to both historical analysis and a novel form of philosophical reflection. This book, the first full-scale study of Lefort to appear in English, offers a clear and compelling account of Lefort's accomplishment—its unique merits, its relation to political philosophy within the Continental tradition, and its great relevance today. Much of what passes for political philosophy in our day is merely politicized philosophical concepts, a distinction author Bernard Flynn underscores as he describes the development of Lefort's truly political philosophy—its ideas formed in response to his own political experience and to the work of certain major figures within the tradition of political thought. Beginning with Lefort's most important single work, his book on Machiavelli, Flynn presents the philosopher's conceptions of politics, modernity, and interpretation in the context within which they took shape. He then draws on a wide variety of Lefort's works to explicate his notions of premodern and modern democracy in which totalitarianism, in Lefort's singular and highly influential theory, is identified as a permanent problem of modernity. A valuable exposition of one of the most important Continental philosophers of the post-World War II period, Flynn's book is itself a noteworthy work of interpretive philosophy, pursuing the ideas and issues addressed by Lefort to a point of unparalleled clarity and depth.

The Political Forms of Modern Society

The Political Forms of Modern Society PDF Author: Claude Lefort
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262620545
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
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.

Machiavelli in the Making

Machiavelli in the Making PDF Author: Claude Lefort
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810124378
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
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.

Writing, the Political Test

Writing, the Political Test PDF Author: Claude Lefort
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822325208
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
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.

A Companion to Continental Philosophy

A Companion to Continental Philosophy PDF Author: Simon Critchley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0631190139
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
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.

Claude Lefort

Claude Lefort PDF Author: M. Plot
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230375588
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
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.

Thinking Radical Democracy

Thinking Radical Democracy PDF Author: Martin Breaugh
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442622008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
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.

Complications

Complications PDF Author: Claude Lefort
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231133005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
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.

The Prose of the World

The Prose of the World PDF Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810106154
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
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.