ABSTRACT

Claude Lefort’s Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy accompanies his past interrogations of totalitarianism, his commitment to democracy and his engagements with the works of Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Tocqueville (Lefort, 2007; see also Lefort, 1986, 1988, 2000). It also joins those studies that have interrogated the nature of the Soviet system, and which notably include Richard Pipe’s Russia Under the Old Regime, Raymond Aron’s Democracy and Totalitarianism, Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller and György Markus’s Dictatorship Over Needs, Johann P. Arnason’s The Future that Failed, François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion and Martin Malia’s The Tragedy of Communism, and even cinematically Testimony and The Lives of Others.1 Although some of these works were written prior to the self-instituted demise of the Soviet system in 1991, it is always a danger to impute a teleology, even a negative one with its hope of collapse, when generating a critique of totalitarianism. Perhaps, and drawing on Malia’s title, there was never, for Lefort, a tragedy, or an illusion (Furet) in any meaningful sense, but rather the creation of a completely new system that ushered in a different modernity from the one usually associated, teleologically or otherwise, with markets, democracy and the imputed ideas of freedom and progress. Lefort’s study, first published in French in 1999, and begun initially as a review of Furet’s and Malia’s own studies, attempts to comprehend and reconstruct the uniqueness of this new and different modernity – not as an abnormality or pathology, or as a tragedy, illusion or failure, but as a social creation sui generis. For Lefort, ‘tragedy’ is such a disturbing word. It only makes sense if there

exists within its inner conceptualisation, an inner logic or truth (or conflict between two truths) that becomes ‘unfixed’ because of some contingent, unexpected and inexplicable state of affairs. In the context of the history of the Soviet system from Lenin to Gorbechev there might be the sense of ‘if only’; if only there had been better understanding, better vision, better history, better leadership, a better party, better reflexivity. Lefort, in his critiques of Furet and Malia, dispenses with this ‘if only’ sensibility. Rather, for him, there is a contingency that is suppressed within such hoped-for thinking. This contingency simply is. The contingency of the Soviet experiment is the indetermination as a creative social imaginary with its own direction and self-legitimation, which

to be sure had a genealogy, a germ that, he, Furet, and Malia make clear, includes the French and Russian Jacobins, especially Robespierre and Tkachev, and the Slavophile controversy (Lefort, 2007; Furet, 1999: 1-33; Malia, 1994: 21-78).2 However, this genealogy did not set down a predetermined path, but lit beacons for the not so wary, the opportunistic, the fellow travellers and the ignominious to follow. The revolution of February 1917 and the October seizure of power occurred in the context of these lit paths. For Lefort, though, there was no trajectory; rather there was an innovation and rupture of the revolutionary tradition and the creation of totalitarianism, pure and simple.