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Modern French Philosophy

French Post-Marxism

Peter Benson tells us how critiques of both Marx and capitalist society have evolved in France, with special reference to Jean Baudrillard and Bernard Stiegler.

In 1989, when the Soviet Union imploded and its satellite states chaotically collapsed, there were those in the West who declared that communism had been not only defeated but refuted. Francis Fukuyama famously declared that History was at an End, with the Cold War stand-off between capitalism and communism resolved with the triumph of capitalism.

Twenty-five years later the ideological landscape looks very different. The catastrophic economic crisis of 2008 led to large-scale protests and riots in Spain, Greece, Britain, the US, and elsewhere, with an avowed ‘anti-capitalist’ agenda. This, however, was not necessarily classical Marxist-Leninism rising from the dead.

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