party and became the Socialism or Barbarism group and which, in 1949, started a journal with this name. Socialism or Barbarism considered the USSR to be an example of state capitalism and gave its support to anti-bureaucratic revolts in Eastern Europe — especially the uprising in Budapest in 1956. Differences of opinion brought about a schism within Socialism or Barbarism, and Lefort sided with Henri Simon, one of the founders of the group Informations et Liaison Ouvrières (Workers' Information and Liaison)—later renamed "Informations et Correspondance Ouvrieres" (Worker's Information and Correspondence)—in 1958. That year he abandoned the idea and ideology of political revolution and ceased his militant activism. After having worked amongst other places, in 1947 and 1948 for UNESCO, in 1949 Lefort passed the aggregation in philosophy: he taught at the high school in Nîmes (1950) and in Reims (1951). In 1951, he was recruited as a sociology assistant at the Sorbonne by Georges Gurvitch. In the year 1952 (following a dispute with Gurvitch), he was detached from the sociology section of the CNRS, until 1966, with a break of two years (1953–1954), when he was professor of philosophy at University of São Paulo (Brazil). As for the CNRS, the support of Raymond Aron led to his recruitment as a teacher of sociology at the University of Caen, where he worked from 1966 to 1971, the year when he defended as his doctoral thesis his book on Machiavelli, The Labour of Work. That same year, he was again hired as a researcher in the sociology section of the CNRS until 1976, when he joined the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where he stayed until his retirement in 1989. The intellectual work of Lefort is strongly tied to his participation, often tension filled, in successive journals. With ("Modern Times") – introduced by Merleau-Ponty – he took part in the "gatherings of collaborators" and wrote from 1945 until his debate with J. P. Sartre in 1953. In Socialism or Barbarism (which lasted from 1949 to 1967 and of which he was the co-founder), he was active until 1950, then from 1955 to 1958. He was involved in Textures (established in 1969) from 1971 to the end (1975) and there he brought in Castoriadis and Miguel Abensour. With them (as well as Pierre Clastres and Marcel Gauchet) he created Libre in 1977, which was published up until 1980, when there were