This is the first English language volume to offer such a wide-ranging scholarly and intellectual perspective on Claude Lefort. It constitutes the most comprehensive attempt to reconstruct Lefort's engagement with his theoretical interlocutors as well as his influence on today's democratic thought and contemporary continental political philosophy.

'...in Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political we have a collection of essays that is perpetually circling notions of contingency; of impermanence; of indeterminacy in political and social life; of the dissolution of the markers of certainty; and of a common vocabulary that is rooted not in the resolution of political conflict, but in its negotiation.'

Dan DiPiero, Continental Philosophy Review, Volume 6, No.4, December 2013

Autorentext
Andrew Arato, New School for Social Research, USA Giles Bataillon, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France Newton Bignotto, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil Steven Bilakovics, Christopher Newport University, USA Warren Breckman, University of Pennsylvania, USA Jean Cohen, Columbia University, USA Marc G. Doucet, University of Ottawa, Canada Bernard Flynn, Undergraduate New School For Research, USA Claudia Hilb, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina Dick Howard, SUNY, USA Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, USA Brian C. J. Singer, Glendon College, York University, Canada Michael B. Smith, Berry College, USA Jeremy Valentine, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK

Inhalt
Foreword; Bernard Flynn Acknowledgements Note to Contributors Introduction; Martín Plot PART I: CLAUDE LEFORT, A CLOSE READER: INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES AND DIALOGUES 1. Claude Lefort: A Political Biography; Dick Howard 2. Lefort as Phenomenologist of the Political; Bernard Flynn 3. Lefort and Machiavelli; Newton Bignotto 4. Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division; Samuel Moyn 5. Claude Lefort as Reader of Leo Strauss; Claudia Hilb PART II: INTERPRETING THE POLITICAL: EVENTS AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 6. Claude Lefort, the Practice and Thought of Disincorporation; Giles Bataillon 7. The Style Claude Lefort; Michael B. Smith 8. Lefort, the Philosopher of 1989; Andrew Arato 9. Rethinking the Politics of Human Rights and Democracy with and beyond Claude Lefort; Jean Cohen 10. Lefort and Tocqueville on the Possibility of Democratic Despotism; Steven Bilakovics PART III: SYMBOLIC MUTATIONS: LEFORT'S INFLUENCE IN CONTEMPORARY DEMOCRATIC THEORY 11. Thinking Democracy Beyond Regimes: 'Untangling Political Analysis from the Nation-State; Marc G. Doucet 12. Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension; Warren Breckman 13. Democracy Beyond the Political; Brian Singer 14. Lefort and the Fate of Radical Democracy; Jeremy Valentine 15. The Advent of the Aesthetico-Political; Martín Plot