From the prince to the conspirator: Lefort’s Machiavelli and the critique of democratic idealism

Abstract

Of the triple criticism that Claude Lefort claimed to find in Machiavelli – against tyranny, bourgeois conservatism and democratic idealism – little attention is usually paid to the last one. In this article, we will demonstrate that the greatest work of the French philosopher, Le Travail de l'œuvre, Machiavel (1972), in addition to a critique of tyranny and oligarchic rule, constitutes above all a long demonstration of the way in which democracy ends up finding her most potent enemy in the idealized image of itself. Following in the footsteps of Lefort's Machiavelli, we will see the character of the conspirator emerge to the foreground, who will bring to the scene the proposition of the inevitability of the imposture of power and the defense of the indispensability and legitimacy of the illegal act undertaken against illegitimate legality.