In his erudite historical survey, Van Middelaar shows that this radical approach is rooted in the French Revolution; and that it was bolstered in the thirties by the lectures on Hegel by the Franco-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève who called politics a life-and-death struggle between ‘masters and slaves’. Hence small advances and compromise became suspect from the outset, and French philosophy was caught between terrorism and impotence.

To escape, the ‘new philosophers’ replaced politics with a human-rights ethic in the seventies, but they, too, failed to define genuinely democratic politics. That definition was given by Claude Lefort, who provided democracy with new foundations. With a detailed discussion of Lefort’s ideas, Van Middelaar concludes a book that not only casts an intriguing light on one of the most eventful episodes of twentieth-century intellectual history, but also takes a penetrating look at the central problems of politics.

In particular, Van Middelaar convincingly demonstrates that politics is far from dead and that, precisely because of our uncertainty about the future of society, it has a crucial role to play. Steering a course between pragmatism and the temptations of dogmatic certainty, his book is a brilliant defence of the viability of political democracy.