The first movements of Lefort's critique to soviet totalitarism

The sense of socialism in question

Abstract

The article presents Claude Lefort's first steps in elaborating his critique of the Soviet regime from the end of the 1940s onwards. If in his youth essays a double effort: at the same time that he seeks to discern the nature of bureaucratic domination in the USSR, Lefort endeavors to give a democratic meaning to the definition of socialism, moving away from the objectivist paradigm that reduces it to the legal form of ownership or formal economic criteria (nationalization, collectivization, planning, etc.). In order to bring to light this double movement active in Lefort's first criticisms, we will make considerations about the historical and conceptual conjuncture of the time, the progressive construction of the concept of totalitarianism, and the background conception of an "authentic socialism" that guides the analyzes of the young thinker.