Cornelius Castoriadis 1922 – 1997

Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and political theorist. A founding figure of the heterodox Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie in post-war Paris, he broke with Marxism in the 1960s while retaining a radical commitment to the project of human self-government. His Imaginary Institution of Society argued that human beings inhabit a world of their own instituting through what he called the social imaginary, and that political autonomy is the project of consciously assuming and remaking that institution. He spent his final decades teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Cornelius Castoriadis was born in 1922 at Constantinople and grew up in Athens, where he studied law, economics, and philosophy at the University of Athens during the Axis occupation. A clandestine Trotskyist in the Greek Communist underground, he sailed for Paris in late 1945 to escape the Greek Civil War. He worked as an economist for the OECD until 1970 and was naturalized as a French citizen the same year.

With Claude Lefort he founded in 1948 the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and the political group of the same name, which over the 1950s broke with Trotskyism and with Marxism altogether and developed an analysis of bureaucratic capitalism East and West. From 1979 he was a directeur d'etudes at the EHESS in Paris. His major works include The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975), the six volumes of the Crossroads in the Labyrinth essays, and the posthumously published seminars on the philosophical creation of Greek and modern democracy.

Castoriadis argued that society institutes itself through the social imaginary — significations not derivable from any logic of being — and that the project of autonomy, born in classical Athens and modern revolution, is the deliberate self-instituting of society and self by those subject to its laws. His thought has shaped contemporary social theory, political philosophy, and the study of democracy. He died in Paris in December 1997.