Free Republic

Back in the 1960s, or even early seventies, if you asked the average intelligent person to name a philosopher, the answer would as likely have been Jean-Paul Sartre as it would have been Aristotle or Plato. “The Pope of Existentialism,” as people called him, enjoyed household-name status. By the time of his death in 1980, however, Sartre’s star had already darkened; the 50,000 mourners who shuffled after his casket to Montparnasse cemetery in Paris represented a last flare from his vanishing fame, not a sign of real influence. Structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, colonial studies — as new radical enthusiasms swept through...

The most famous exports of France have always been cheese, wine, and ideas. The cheese is excellent, the wine has good and bad years, and the illustrious ideas are consistently dreadful. Today, in universities across the West, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) exemplifies the bad French idea at its most brilliant and its most poisonous. Foucault spent his life proving that the institutions of modern civilization do nothing but disguise one essential truth: the powerful oppress everyone, always. He yearned for revolution, the bloodier the better. In 1971 he said that when the workers take power, they may create a murderous dictatorship:...