Friday 21 November 1986

CRITICISING BUREAUCRACY

Paul Anderson, review of The Political Forms of Modern Society by Claude Lefort (Polity, £8.95), Tribune, 21 November 1986

Claude Lefort is a French social theorist. In the English-speaking world he's known only as the posthumous editor of Merleau-Ponty and as the victim of one of Sartre's more intemperate polemics. The Political Forms of Modern Society, a collection of ten essays written between 1948 and 1981, shows that he deserves far greater attention here than he has enjoyed so far.

The subjects of the essays vary, but their central theme is an analysis and radical democratic critique of bureaucracy and totalitarianism. Lefort takes very seriously the political questions posed by the experience of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

His grappling with these questions has led him from a libertarian Marxist demolition of Trotskyism in the late 1940s (when he was one of the founders of the review Socialisme ou Barbarie) to a position emphasising the importance of the struggle for human rights in what he now sees as totalitarian societies.

Some would see such an evolution as a shift to the right. I don't think it is. Lefort's use of the concept of totalitarianism is not that of a 1950s cold warrior, and many (but not all) of his arguments are subtle and persuasive. He should be taken seriously by all who consider themselves on the left — regardless of whether the Soviet line in current arms negotiations is better than that of the US.