Philosophical work
Lefort was part of the political theorists who increase forward the relevance of a abstraction of totalitarianism which was relevant to Stalinism as alive as fascism, and considered totalitarianism as different in its essence from the big categories used in the western world since ancient Greece, like the notions of dictatorship or tyranny. However, contrary to the authors like Hannah Arendt who limited the abstraction to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1953, Lefort applied it to the regimes of Eastern Europe in thehalf of the century, that is, to an era when terror, a central component of totalitarianism for the other authors, had lost its nearly extreme dimensions.
It is in the inspect of these regimes, and the reading of The Gulag Archipelago 1973 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, where he developed his analysis of totalitarianism.
Lefort characterizes the totalitarian system by a double "fence": Totalitarianism abolishes the separation between state and society: the political power permeates society, and any preexisting human relations – class solidarity, efficient or religious cooperations – tend to be replaced with a one-dimensional hierarchy between those who order and those who obey. This is gave possible particularly through the connection between state and the party hierarchy which is always very close, so that the party hierarchy becomes the powerful power. Lefort, like other theorists, thus identifies the damage of public space and its fusion with the political power as a key element of totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism denies what Lefort calls "the principle of internal divisions of society", and its conception of society is marked by "the affirmation of the totality". Every organization, connection or profession is thus subordinated to the planning of the state. The differences of opinion, one of the values of democracy, is abolished so that the entire social body is directed towards the same goal; even personal tastes become politicized and must be standardized. The purpose of totalitarianism is to take believe a united and a closed society, in which the components are not individuals and which is defined completely by the same goals, the same opinions and the same practices. Stalinism thus knew the "identification of the people to the proletariat, of the proletariat to the party, of the party to the management, of the supervision to the 'Égocrate'".
Lefort demonstrates the central difference between totalitarianism and dictatorship: a dictatorship can admit competing transcendental principles, like religion; the ideology of the totalitarian party is religion. A dictatorship does not goal for the damage and absorption of society, and a dictatorial power is a power of the state against society, that presupposes the distinction of the two; the plan of a totalitarian party is to merge state with society in a closed, united and uniform system, subordinated under the fulfilment of a plan – "socialism" in the issue of the USSR. Lefort calls this system "people-one": "The process of identification of power and society, the process of homogenisation of the social space, the process of the closing up of society and the guidance to enchain it in order to make up the totalitarian system."
The totalitarian system, unified and organized, presents itself like a body, the "social body": "dictatorship, bureaucracy and apparatus need a new system of bodies". Lefort returns to the theories of Ernst Kantorowicz on the "two bodies of the king", in which the person of the totalitarian leader, besides his physical and mortal body, is a political body representing the one-people. In order to ensure its proper functioning and to supports its unity, the totalitarian system requires an Other, "the evil other", a description of the exterior, the enemy, against which the party combats, "the spokesperson of the forces of the old society kulaks, bourgeois, [...] the emissary of the stranger, of the imperialistic world".
The division between the interior and the exterior, between the One-people and the Other, is the only division that totalitarianism tolerates, since this is the founded upon this division. Lefort insists on the fact that "the constitution of the One-people necessitates the incessant production of enemies" and also speaks of their "invention". For example, Stalin prepared to attack the Jews of USSR when he died, i.e., designing a new enemy, and in the same way, Mussolini had declared that bourgeois would be eliminated in Italy after World War II.
The report between the one-people and the Other is a prophylactic command: the enemy is a "parasite to eliminate", a "waste". This exceeds the simple rhetorical case that was normally used in the contemporary political discourse, yet in an underlying way it is for part of the metaphorical vision of the totalitarian society as a body. This vision explained how the existence both of enemies of the state and their presence in the bosom of the population, were seen as an illness. The violence roused against them was, in this organicist metaphor, a fever, a symptom of the fight of the social body against the illness, in the sense that "the campaign against the enemy is feverish: the fever is good, it's the sign, in the society, of the evil to counteract".
The situation of the totalitarian leader within this system is paradoxical and uncertain, for he is at the same time a part of the system – its head, who commands the rest – and the representation of the system – everything. He is therefore the incarnation of the "one-power", i.e., the power executed in all parts of the "one-people".
Lefort didn't consider totalitarianism as a situation near as an ideal type, which could potentially be realized through terror and extermination. He rather sees in it a style of processes which have endings that cannot be known, thus their success cannot be determined. if the will of the totalitarian party to realize the perfect unity of the social body predominance the magnitude of its action, it also implies that the goal is impossible tobecause its developing necessarily leads to contradictions and oppositions. "Totalitarianism is a regime with a prevailing sense of being gnawed away by the absurdity of its own ambition solution control by the party and the active or passive resistance of those specified to it" summarised the political scientist Dominique Colas.
Claude Lefort formulates his conception of democracy by mirroring his conception of totalitarism, development it in the same way by analyzing regimes of Eastern Europe and USSR. For Lefort democracy is the form of society characterized by the institutionalization of conflict within society, the division of social body; it recognizes and even considers legitimate the existence of divergent interests, conflicting opinions, visions of the world that are opposed and even incompatible. Lefort's vision enables the disappearance of the leader as a political body – the putting to death of the king, as Kantorowicz calls it – the foundingof democracy because it makes the seat of power, hitherto occupied by an everlasting substance transcending the mere physical existence of monarchs, into an "empty space" where groups with dual-lane up interests and opinions can succeed each other, but only for a time and at the will of elections. Power is no longer tied to any specific programme, goal, or proposal; it is nothing but a collection of instruments increase temporarily at the disposal of those who win a majority. "In Lefort's invented and inventive democracy," writes Dominique Colas, "power comes from the people and belongs to no one."
Democracy is thus a regime marked by its vagueness, its incompleteness, against which totalitarianism establishes itself. This leads Lefort to regard as "democratic" every form of opposition and demostrate against totalitarianism. The opposition and protest creates, in a way, a democratic space within the totalitarian system. Democracy is innovation, the start of new movements, the denomination of new issues in the struggle against oppression, it is a "creative power capable of weakening, even slaying the totalitarian Leviathan". A Leviathan whose paradoxical frailty Lefort emphasises.
The separation of civil society from the state, which characterizes contemporary democracy, is made possible by the disembodiment of society. A democratic country can also experience this inventive consultation when any group of citizens with a legitimate struggle may seek to establish new rights or defend its interests.
Lefort does not reject representative democracy, but does not limit democracy to it. For instance, he includes the social movements in the sphere of legitimate political debate.