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In a 1980 article “The Logic of Totalitarianism,” Lefort reflects on the systematic denegation of the perception of Soviet totalitarianism on the part of the left intelligentsia.1 He questions from where this blind denial could have sprung and remarks that at first totalitarianism was a concept adapted by the right. Its definition, as it appeared in a 1933 edition of Le Petit Robert, basically says that it is a single-party state in which dissent is not permitted; it is also referred to as a God-state. This definition was written by Jacques Bainville, a conservative nationalist thinker and one of the founders of Action Française. The concept was advanced by the right—at least that part of the right that was not pro-Fascist. During World War II it became an epithet hurled at the Nazis. Nonetheless, by and large the USSR was not thought of as a totalitarian society. Martin Malia shows to what extent Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a captive of the “convergence thesis,” remained blind to the specificity of totalitarianism. After the conclusion of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, the concept of totalitarianism was used by a certain stratum of liberals to designate both Communism and Fascism. Nonetheless, on the left there was a massive resistance to this category, which was viewed as something forged in order to justify “Western imperialism” and to disarm any critique of capitalism. As an early reader of Arendt, Lefort noted that her analysis, and analyses similar to it, found little support in the France of this time. We must add that this phenomenon was by no means limited to France. In the late 1980s in New York, there was a discussion in which a “leftist” denounced me for employing such an “abstract” category (totalitarianism ) because it homogenized so many differences; when I responded that he seemed to have no such problem using the “concept of capitalism,” there was no reply. Regarding the notion of totalitarianism, leftists became nominalists. Furet, of whom I will speak more later, is quite Totalitarianism as Regime 11 207 skittish about using the term. In The Passing of an Illusion, he writes, “In keeping with common practice, I have used the term ‘totalitarianism’ to describe the regime [the USSR] because it is the least inadequate.”2 Furet, his own reservations notwithstanding, critically surveys the fate of the concept in the hands of American social scientists who rejected it because it was not sufficiently scientific. It offended the social scientists’ “ambition to find the true causes of social functioning hidden beneath the interminable commentary that every society issues about itself. . . . They combine the ‘infra-structural’ approach with a fondness for the ‘little man’; they work the fabric of [Soviet] society from bottom to top. Thanks to the social scientists, the USSR was restored to the common context in which societies are judged.”3 In the context, it is clear that the last sentence is meant to be ironic; what it means to say is that thanks to the social scientists the specificity of the Soviet regime was ignored. Furet reaffirms what both Lefort and Leo Strauss have said: that the social sciences appear incapable of distinguishing different types of regimes. Perhaps in tandem with this incapability, Lefort provides another reason for the left’s blindness with regard to the concept of totalitarianism. He writes, “I would now dare to say that it is because this concept [totalitarianism] is political and the left does not think in political terms” (PFM, 277). In taking this position, Lefort is in profound agreement with the thought of Arendt, but his reasons for taking it are quite different from hers. For Arendt, the inability to think politically is consequent upon the “rise of the social” in modern society, by which she means the invasion of the “metabolism of the life processes” into the space of action. Arendt gives particular emphasis here to the notion of process. She claims that the intellectual translation of the process character of modern society gives rise to both social philosophies and philosophies of history, but it does not give rise to political philosophy. Employing the title of Hannah Pittman’s book on Arendt, The Attack of the Blob, we can say that for Arendt the denegation of political philosophy is an effect of “the blob,” that is, the life processes’ ability to annul the space of difference and plurality , the space in which political action and thought are possible. Lefort’s response...

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