Complications is a brilliant study of the nature of communist totalitarianism pursued through the criticism of the recent work of two neo-liberal historians, Francois Furet and Martin Malia. Their books, The Passing of an Illusion and The Soviet Tragedy respectively were enthusiastically received in the West and, in Lefort's view, have drastically and harmfully oversimplified the nature of the Soviet regime and the nature of the support for it in the interests of providing a historiographical complement to the aggressive neo-liberal consensus of the present day. Lefort, who has always insisted on the relevance of the critique of totalitarianism to the renewal of the left, detects in the authors he surveys a neo-liberal bias that corrupts their interpretation both of the nature and of the lasting significance of the communist regime. It matters a great deal how autopsies of the Soviet Union are conducted because they imply what range of alternatives there is to its failed and criminal enterprise.

Claude Lefort is the director of studies emeritus at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales. He is the author of Writing: The Political Test, Democracy and Political Theory, and Political Forms of Modern Society, among other works. Julian Bourg is assistant professor of history at Bucknell University. He is the editor of After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France and the author of From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Among his books are The Marxian Legacy (2nd ed.), The Birth of American Political Thought, From Marx to Kant (2nd ed.), and Political Judgments.