Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy - Hardcover

by Claude Lefort (Author), Julian Bourg (Translator), Dick Howard (Preface by)

Complications is a brilliant study of the nature of communist totalitarianism pursued through the criticism of the recent work of two neo-liberal historians, Francois Furet and Martin Malia. Their books, The Passing of an Illusion and The Soviet Tragedy respectively were enthusiastically received in the West and, in Lefort's view, have drastically and harmfully oversimplified the nature of the Soviet regime and the nature of the support for it in the interests of providing a historiographical complement to the aggressive neo-liberal consensus of the present day. Lefort, who has always insisted on the relevance of the critique of totalitarianism to the renewal of the left, detects in the authors he surveys a neo-liberal bias that corrupts their interpretation both of the nature and of the lasting significance of the communist regime. It matters a great deal how autopsies of the Soviet Union are conducted because they imply what range of alternatives there is to its failed and criminal enterprise.

Author Biography

Claude Lefort is the Director of Studies Emeritus in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales and a leading political philosopher in France. He is the author of many works including Democracy and Political Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and The Political Forms of Modern Society (MIT Press, 1986). Julian Bourg (Ph.D, University of California, Berkeley, 2001) is assistant professor of history at Bucknell University.