
The Mediocracy
French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970s
Dominique Lecourt(Author)
Verso Books (Publisher)
Published on 17. March 2001
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-1-85984-793-0 (ISBN)
Article exhausted; check for reprint
Description
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 pensee '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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 142 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
459 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85984-793-0 (9781859847930)
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Book
11/2002
Verso Books
€24.00
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Persons
Dominique Lecourt was a pupil of Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida at the Ecole Normal Superieure in the 1960s. Now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII, his publications in English include Marxism and Epistemology and Proletarian Science?
Gregory Elliott is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and author of Althusser: The Detour of Theory and Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Decay of Labour England?.
Gregory Elliott is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and author of Althusser: The Detour of Theory and Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Decay of Labour England?.