Castoriadis, Cornelius

The leading modern Greek philosopher, Castoriadis (1922–1997) was born in Constantinople, grew up in Athens, and spent most of his adult life in France. He studied law, economics, and philosophy at the University of Athens. His political views were formed in the atmosphere of bitterly divided loyalties in Greece during the 1940s. He was an independent-minded leftist from the beginning and joined the youth wing of the Greek Communist Party when he was 15, turning Reform Communist in 1941. Fed up with communist shenanigans, the following year, he became a Trotskyist. Death threats from both Nazis and communists eventually forced him to flee Athens for Paris in 1945. In France, he joined with Claude Lefort to create the dissident Chaulieu-Montal Tendency in Leon Trotsky's Fourth International. The pair developed ideas of worker self-management similar to another dissenting Trotskyist, Raya Dunayevskaya, in Detroit.

Concluding that Trotskyism was just another Stalinism, Castoriadis and Lefort founded the group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949–1965). This group attracted a mix of self-management activists and a number of great writing talents, including Jean-François Lyotard. Castoriadis wrote under the pseudonyms of Paul Cardan and Jean-Marc Coudray. Socialisme ou Barbarie made a belated name for itself as an influence on the student revolt of May 1968 in France. Castoriadis's leftist Hellenism also brought him into close contact with the classical scholars Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean-Pierre Vernant. During the Socialisme ou Barbarie years, he remained a Greek national and worked as an economist for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He eventually took out French citizenship in 1970 and quit the OECD to train as a psychoanalyst. He started practising in 1974. From 1979, he combined his psychoanalytic practice with the position of Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He was an imposing public speaker, and his lectures at the École and in other philosophical and political forums were memorable events.

Castoriadis's key concept was the autonomous society. His basic idea was that all societies create themselves. They are not produced by God or by gods, by culture heroes, demiurges, and the hidden hand of capital, or by History. However, having formed themselves, most societies hide their own processes of collective self-creation. Castoriadis's view was a variation on the conundrum of Feurerbach and Marx that what a society creates, creates society. This paradox of creation often causes societies to become alienated from themselves.

A heteronomous society is one that is blindly governed by its own creation. It looks on its own norms and rules and structures in an unquestioning manner. Members of society suppose that principles of social organization are given once and for all. Theocracies, monarchies, caste systems, landed aristocracies, tribes, patrimonial empires, and feudal societies are amongst the legion of types of heteronomous society. Autonomous societies, in contrast, are not just collectively instituted, but can be reformed, revised, and rethought by social actors.

Castoriadis identified two kinds of autonomous society in history. Both were self-organizing societies with a strong sense of civic order. The first was the ancient Greek polis. The second was a cluster of societies that emerged in the West from the twelfth century onward and created modernity. In the latter group, Castoriadis included the Italian Renaissance city-states, burgher cities such as Amsterdam, the American Republic, and Western European Enlightenment states of the period 1750 to 1950. In modernity and antiquity, an exceptionally high level of artistic and scientific output characterized autonomous societies. This was a corollary of the high level of productive imagination required for persistent collective creation. Castoriadis observed that the waning of creative power in the West (certainly in the arts) after 1950 coincided with the spread of postmodern conformism and cults of critical orthodoxy amongst Western intellectuals.

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