These pages serve as a brief introduction to the Focus dedicated to the article Sur la démocratie. Le politique et l’institution du social, written by Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet in 1971 and recently republished in an Italian edition. After sketching the essential historical context in which the article took shape and first appeared, the introduction outlines its significance in relation to two main questions. The first concerns the article’s importance as the text in which the “theory of the institution of the social” — shared by thinkers such as Lefort, Castoriadis, Gauchet, and Abensour — receives its first systematic presentation. The second shows how the concepts developed in Sur la démocratie can help us make sense of society, politics, democracy, and the challenges of our own time.
