Do republicanismo à democracia: o conflito como fundamento político em Claude Lefort

Our intention in this article is to show how Claude Lefort conceives democracy as, more than a political regime, a privileged historical form for being one in which society expresses itself politically without nullifying a fundamental element for the preservation of its liberty: conflict. For this, we start from Lefortian studies on Machiavelli to investigate how the author extracts the meaning of this fundamental conflict from republicanism and how he sees in this political form the gestation of a decisive historical mutation: the emptying of the place of power.