some disagreements with Castoriadis as well as with Gauchet. From 1982 to 1984, he led Passé-Present where amongst others Miguel Abensour, , and Pierre Pachet participated. These last two as well as Claude Habib formed the reading committee of the Littérature et Politique that Lefort founded for the publisher Éditions Belin in 1987. No doubt he assigned less importance to the research centers at which he had participated in EHESS: the CECMAS (center of the study of mass communication), founded by Georges Friedmann and which welcomed Edgar Morin, then the Centre Aron, which he frequented just before his death. When Merleau-Ponty died in 1961, Lefort took charge of the publication of his manuscripts. In the 1970s, he developed an analysis of bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe. He read The Gulag Archipelago and published a book on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His main ideas on Stalinist totalitarianism were published in 1981 in a collection titled . Philosophical work Conception of totalitarianism Lefort was part of the political theorists who put forward the relevance of a notion of totalitarianism which was relevant to Stalinism as well as fascism, and considered totalitarianism as different in its essence from the big categories used in the western world since ancient Greece, like the notions of dictatorship or tyranny. However, contrary to the authors like Hannah Arendt who limited the notion to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1953, Lefort applied it to the regimes of Eastern Europe in the second half of the century, that is, to an era when terror, a central element of totalitarianism for the other authors, had lost its most extreme dimensions. It is in the study of these regimes, and the reading of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, where he developed his analysis of totalitarianism. The double fence society Lefort characterizes the totalitarian system by a double "fence": Totalitarianism abolishes the separation between state and society: the political power permeates society, and all preexisting human relations – class solidarity, professional or religious cooperations – tend to be replaced with a one-dimensional hierarchy between those who order and those who obey. This is made possible especially through the association between state and the party hierarchy which is always very close, so that the party hierarchy becomes the effective power. Lefort, like other theorists, thus identifies the destruction of public space and its fusion with the political power as