ABSTRACT
Claude Lefort developed two very different interpretations of the council tradition following his encounter with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In an early analysis, published just after the events in Hungary, he stressed the inherent conflict between the councils and a party system, substantially in accord with other prominent political thinkers of the councils, such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt. Yet, in a later analysis, published in 1976, Lefort argued that the genuine novelty of the Hungarian councils was the self-limiting and power-dispersing nature of a mixed regime of parties, unions and councils in institutionalised conflict. I argue that Lefort’s substantial reformulation of his position vis-à-vis the councils ought to be understood against the backdrop of his theory of democracy as an empty place of power. Lefort’s mixed regime of a socialist democracy is a pertinent way to understand the institutional form of a society founded upon an empty place of power, because it institutionalises the values of indeterminacy, conflict and difference, which Lefort attributes to modern democracy. Such a socialist democracy cannot be subsumed under the distinction between liberal democracy and radical democracy, which is often used to discuss Lefort’s work. Contrary to the liberal interpretation of Lefort, which highlights democracy’s emptiness as primarily a result of representation, Lefort’s socialist democracy includes a wider democratisation of society along with the self-management of economic production through the councils. In opposition to the radical democratic reading of Lefort, which interprets democracy’s emptiness as emerging through an inherent hostility towards institutionalisation, Lefort’s socialist democracy reveals that it is the conflict between institutions, not the absence of them, which continually produces democracy’s empty place of power.
