This article offers a reinterpretation Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet’s Sur la démocratie: le politique et l’institution du social as a decisive moment in the reformulation of critical thought dring the crisis of Marxism. It argues that the authors articulate a dissociation between democracy and capitalis m that frees the former from its reduction to a mere superstructure, while proposing a new critique of capitalist society. In fact, their relation is understood as an interplay of complicity and conflict: through the notion of the political institution of the social and a new theory of democracy they show that the democratic regime creates the conditions of possibility for capitalism while sim- ultaneously preventing its totalizing fulfillment. On this basis, Sur la démocratie contributes to a plu- ralization o f modernity. Finally, this perspective is put into dialogue with Cornelius Castoriadis, whose interpretation radicalizes this tension into an antinomy between instituting principles
