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'''Claude Lefort''' was born in [[1924]] and was politically active by [[1942]] under the influence of his tutor, the [[Phenomenology|phenomenologist]] [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]] (whose posthumous publications Lefort later edited). By [[1943]] he was organising a faction of the [[Trotskyist]] [[Parti Communiste Internationaliste]] at the Lycée Henry IV in [[Paris]]. Lefort was impressed by [[Cornelius Castoriadis]] when he first met him. From [[1946]] he collaborated with him in the Chaulieu-Montal Tendency, from their noms-de guerre ''Pierre Chaulieu'' (Castoriadis) and ''Claude Montal'' (Lefort), publishing ''0n the Regime and Against the Defence of the USSR'', a critique of both the [[Soviet Union]] and its Trotskyist supporters. They suggested that the [[USSR]] was dominated by a social layer of bureaucrats, and that it consisted of a new kind of society as aggressive as Western European societies. By [[1948]] having tried to persuade the other trotskyists of their viewpoint they broke away with about a dozen others and founded the [[libertarian socialist]] group [[Socialisme ou Barbarie]]. Lefort's text "L'Expérience prolétarienne" was important in shifting the group's focus towards forms of self-organisation.

In his academic career, Lefort taught at the [[University of São Paulo]], at the [[Sorbonne]] and at the [[École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales]]. He has written on the early political writers [[Machievelli]] and [[Étienne de La Boétie]] and explored "the Totalitarian enterprise" in its "denial of social division... [and] of the difference between the order of power, the order of law and the order of knowledge" ("Philosopher?", 1985).

[[Category:Marxist theorists|Lefort, Claude]]