The Mediocracy French Philosophy Since 1968

Generating great controversy on its publication in France last year, The Mediocracy argues that a veritable counter-revolution in intellectual life has seen the period of the ?master-thinkers? of the 1960s succeeded by an era of generalized mediocrity. Where Althusser or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida once held centre stage, today restorationist currents prevail in academia and on
television sets. Fuelled by a complaisant media, contemporary French ideology seeks neither to interpret nor to change the world, but is instead content to legitimize a globally hegemonic neo-liberalism.

Lecourt?s story posits two key turning points in the career of the French intelligentsia. The first is the anti-Marxist turn of the mid-1970s, championed by the New Philosophers and prompted by disappointment in an imaginary Maoism as an alternative to official Communism. The second is the revulsion at the theoretical anti-humanism of an alleged pensée ?68, sponsored by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut?s 1985 polemic of that title. Lecourt defends the common critical project to which Althusser, Foucault and others were committed before and after 1968. Contrasting it with the philosophical impostures and political abdications of the present, he calls for a resumption of the traditions that made Paris the post-war intellectual capital of Europe.

"Dominique Lecourt [is] rightly concerned with the present state of French intellectual life and fearful for its future." ? Radical Philosophy

Dominique Lecourt was a pupil of Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida at the Ecole normale supérieure in the 1960s. Now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII, his publications in English include Marxism